The task theology has to fulfill is continually to stimulate and lead [the community] to face squarely the question of the proper relation of their human speech to the Word of God, which is origin, object, and content of this speech. Barth, Karl. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, Grand Rapids. 1979. p […]

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, “You love beer so much. I’ll bet some day you’ll go in and order a beer milk shake.” It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he […]

The Root of Evil: Does Religion Promote Violence?

What the bombers’ motivations were exactly has yet to be pieced together and may never be fully known. What drives a young man to blow up strangers is most often a volatile cocktail of hormone-saturated ingredients, not always fully transparent to the bomber himself. What is known, however, is that a version of Islam played […]

The problem I’ve had and continue to have is that we (upper-middle-class, educated Westerners, for the most part) are a self-celebrating lot. We click “like” on each other, whether by private flattery or public review, and expect to be “liked” back. As a result we churn our culture that’s less threatening, less offensive and cutting, […]

matttaylordraws: Double blog day! This was an editorial piece for the guys over at The New Republic. It turned out rather nicely. Matt Taylor is worth following. Also, Yay! for left-handed writers.

Little Girl Found

The kind folks @curatormagazine have posted one of my essays. Warning: it concerns child abductions. Here’s a link: Little Girl Found. A few years ago in a neighboring town, booming as a safe alternative to my relatively safe city, a man with no criminal record or history drove into the parking lot of a gas […]

[spotify id=”spotify%3Auser%3A122351017%3Aplaylist%3A2qc8STZPA5tMmMSDCeNRKe&view=coverart” width=”500″ height=”580″ /] Here: Ryan Culwell. Winter Wheat. It’s beautiful.  And heads up: a full length album comes out next year (hush hush, from the same people that have brought you Jason Isbell’s recent and stunning Southeastern). Or if you prefer Soundcloud

In the first centuries of Christianity, the new religion proved insufficient for the educated people in many ways, and so gnosticism became widespread. Gnosticism did then what poetry does today for educated people. But poetry should not be reduced to mere aestheticism. In its most important instances, poetry is an exploration of man’s place in […]

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ C.S. Lewis, The […]

Like most good poets, great or minor, Dante wrote better than he had meant to do. Allen Tate. “The Symbolic Imagination.” Essays of Four Decades. p. 440. Third Edition, ISI Books.