Category Archives: Literature

Listening into the silences…

One of the great things about the house I’m renting now is the big backyard, with a little pond that has fountains in it just outside the back door, and a deck bordered on two sides by flowerbeds. The beds … Continue reading

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Winter’s Bone and Rodney Clapp

I’ve only seen a couple of movies this year that I really loved, and at the top of that list is Winter’s Bone (the list also includes Toy Story 3 and Babies. And Crazy Heart, but that’s officially a 2009 … Continue reading

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The tension between pedagogical caution and honesty

I was rereading Reinhold Niebuhr’s first book (published in 1929) earlier today – it holds the distinction as having my favorite book title, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic – while Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Evening Service, Op. 37 was … Continue reading

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The War Prayer (National Day of Prayer, 2010)

The one tradition I have on this blog, so it seems, is to post Mark Twain’s The War Prayer every other year on the National Day of Prayer. I did so back in 2006, again in 2008, and here we … Continue reading

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Acting Out Our Hopes and Yearnings

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece for the Rabbit Room about one of my favorite theologians, Walter Brueggemann, and a trip I took with my friend Scott down to Waco, TX, to attend a conference where Brueggemann was the … Continue reading

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In the Garden of North American Martyrs

This month I participated in the The Faith and Fiction Round Table, organized by My Friend Amy, in a discussion of Tobias Wolff’s collection of short stories, In the Garden of North American Martyrs. We discussed the book by e-mail … Continue reading

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The Fiddler’s Gun on Feeding the Gnome

I once read an interview with a guitar player-can’t remember who, maybe U2′s The Edge-who said that he could tell the difference between the kind of solos he played after a full day of travel and the kind he played … Continue reading

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The Sacred Texts Around Which We Shape Our Lives

At the Christian Scholars Conference I attended a couple weeks ago, Barbara Brown Taylor presented a talk on, “The Power of Narrative in the Age of Twitter.”  She talked about the need to privilege certain narratives,  saying, “I was attending to so … Continue reading

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Imagined Infallibility

After writing the post earlier this week about fundamentalism and intellectual humility, I picked up David Dark’s The Sacredness of Questioning Everything to read another chapter before bed. And, as frequently happens when reading or talking to David, I found … Continue reading

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Crazy for God, part 4 – Theological Purity

I started writing a series of posts reviewing Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back a little … Continue reading

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