Words Are Stuff: Poet Scott Cairns

I don’t want to just complain about my upbringing, because I learned a lot – I learned the love of God from those people – but there was a suspicion about the physical body and stuff, the earth, a sense that the body is expendable and the earth is expendable and what matters is what […]

That night—to some extent, that picture—changed [my friend Rob’s] life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa. The same night sent me in the opposite direction, at least for a time. But would a different painting—Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St. Paul,” for example—have kept me in […]

Our Man in the Pews: The Long Tail of the Rattlesnake

ourmaninthepews: Gone are the days of field research when a renegade ethnographer would pile his hefty recording instruments into the trunk of his car and set out on the back roads of the American South in search of that region’s authentic music. This was the method famously employed by the Lomaxes, John… Several months ago, […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfuwVnggIKM?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375] Christian Wiman delivers the commencement address at North Central College in Illinois. It’s disheartening watching peoples’ expressions as the best speech they’ve ever heard flies over their heads. Unfortunately, I probably would have ignored it as a 22-year-old college graduate, too. More unfortunately, in ten years, I’ll probably regret the things I ignored […]

poetrysince1912: The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger for faith — and the challenges of faith — for people living now. After a Texas upbringing soaked in a history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture, he was agnostic until he became actively religious again in his late 30s. Then he was […]

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a […]