Peak Oil and Place
At last weekend’s Inhabit Conference in Seattle, I had the opportunity to co-facilitate (with Brandon Rhodes) a conversation on “peak oil and place.” It was a lively and fascinating discussion. Near the end I asked a question that I also want to pose here. Cheap fossil fuel energy has underwritten modernity and more than a century of America’s [...]
Busyness and Good Work
I’m thinking today about how busyness can become a substitute for good work. If we are wired for good work – and I believe we are – but aren’t doing it, then busyness is a way of tricking our souls into thinking everything is alright. But everything isn’t alright. If the guitar is out of [...]
Beds and Books: The Hospitality of Shakespeare and Company
Everything that rises must converge. Well, here is a fun convergence of interests. I am writing a chapter on hospitality for the Slow Church book. I have reference volumes stacked ten-high on my desk at home. But in the car to and from work I have been listening to audiobooks by Ernest Hemingway. The first audiobook I [...]
Eternal Beings Living in Time: On Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”
My favorite Wendell Berry novels are The Memory of Old Jack (1952) and Jayber Crow (1986), both of which were featured in 2009 in an issue of Oxford American magazine celebrating great Southern fiction. Now that I am about a quarter of the way through my first chronological exploration of the Port William fiction, I thought I would post here the short [...]
Serving the Common Good: An Interview with Miroslav Volf
Chris and I recently collaborated on an article about the political role of the local church for the upcoming February/March issue of Neue Magazine. In preparation for writing the article, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miroslav Volf about politics, the local church, promoting human flourishing, and his most recent book, A Public Faith: How [...]
A Tale of Two Manifestos
In February 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro. The manifesto exalted the future over the past, violence and aggression over peace and ecstasy, immorality over morality, men over women, the young over the old, the machine over the land, and the known over the [...]
Further Thoughts about Malcolm X’s Life of Reinvention
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am reading the late Dr. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which the New York Times chose as one of its Ten Best Books of 2011. One of the things that has been so striking for me is how “in process” Malcolm X was. Today I [...]
What I’m Reading Now: “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”
The audiobook I’ve been listening to on my commute – and every other chance I get – is Dr. Manning Marable’s riveting biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. I’m over two-thirds of the way through the book. I’m at the point in Malcolm’s life when he was been pushed out of the Nation of [...]
Relevant Magazine: Does Voting Matter?
I wrote an essay on politics for for the January/February issue of Relevant Magazine. It was cross-posted today on Relevant’s website: I cried myself to sleep the night Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. I was 14—too young to vote but old enough to know America had, at the ballot, formally turned its back on [...]
