It’s that time of year again, when my kids groan and roll their eyes as I, Uncle-Rico-like, relive the glory days of the 1980s, regaling them with tales of my freestyle BMX exploits. That’s right: it’s X Games 2011. My favorite event is BMX Freestyle Park–though what they’re doing today bears only an analogical resemblance…
Cross-posting from GoodReads: I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem–one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back…
Josef Bengston passed along this interesting little snippet from Alain de Botton, an old favorite of mine. This is lifted from a TED talk in which he looks to religious sources for secular practices (kind of, in a backhanded way, confirming some of the analyses in Desiring the Kingdom): A sermon wants to change your…
A friend who is a grad student in theology recently expressed some frustration with the proliferation of narrow “camps” in contemporary theology–and hence the lack of space for emerging theologians to engage in conversations which aren’t just predetermined at the outset. What s/he has found is that most theological claims/discussions are judged beforehand by a…
I’m continuing to enjoy Thomas Wolfe’s Letters. They hearken back to an epistolary age that is lost, when the letter had all the potential to be an essay, a short story, a travelogue, a memoir. Our emails will never be the same. Here are just a couple of snippets Wolfe wrote from Europe in 1928….
Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” could be co-opted as an interesting little parable for Christian theology and certain sensibilities within contemporary Christianity. The story centers around Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson): a writer who’s sold his soul to Hollywood screenwriting but is now trying to realize his dream of being a “real” writer, that…