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Food, whether it is used in religious ritual, therapeutic dieting, or ordinary breakfast, lunch, and dinner, is supposed to be good for you. It is supposed to sustain life, to restore and heal. Even when we misuse it—eat or drink excessively, practice fad diets, suffer eating disorders, or cook and feed others to gain their affirmation and praise—it is still (usually) because we see food as something good, something we want to be happy about, something with the potential to satisfying those deeper physical and spiritual hungers, something to make us better. Read More |
The Fluidity of Stone and the Ground of Our Being: Andy Goldsworthy’s Walking Wall
On his first visit to Kansas City, Goldsworthy wasn’t sure what he would do on the grounds of Nelson-Atkins. He found guidance, however, in the words of Plotinus inscribed on the museum’s stately stone edifice: “Art deals with things forever incapable of definition and that belong to love, beauty, joy, and worship; the shapes, powers, and glory of which are ever building, unbuilding, and rebuilding in each man’s soul, and in the soul of the whole world.” Read More |
Five Challenges from Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
Atwood has famously said in interviews that no event in The Handmaid’s Tale or The Testaments is original; everything has already happened somewhere. Probably my favorite single line in The Testaments is Lydia’s reflection at one point: “How tedious is tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot” (143). I think about the shock with which readers in the 1980s responded to The Handmaid’s Tale, and I picture Lydia raising an eyebrow. The plot Lydia is living—the plot Atwood is writing—should be familiar to us. It’s as if Atwood is saying, through Lydia, “Shock, really? Have you no sense of history?” Read More |
Post-Apocalyptic Hope in When the English Fall and The Road
Certainly the two novels have substantial differences. The Road’s profound and provocative prose provides hints of God and raises powerful questions about how to survive and at what price. When the English Fall offers a quieter voice, partly because the story spans the apocalyptic event so that society is still more intact, but also because it focuses on a community grounded in faith. Yet in helpful ways, the texts engage similar concerns of what happens when a society’s structures fall apart as the novels explore their child characters’ seemingly innate connection to the divine, how people should approach external threats, and the possibilities for hopeful outcomes. Read More |
Reading Augustine’s Confessions During Lent
The thing about reading Confessions, at least for me, is that it confronts me with myself. It shatters my pious pretensions and the image I work hard to maintain that basically I’m okay and have everything together, spiritually and otherwise. Read More |
The Distilled Gospel of Kanye West: The Sunday Service Choir’s Jesus Is Born
Despite that simplicity and the fact that we never hear the rapper’s voice, Jesus Is Born sounds like Kanye West’s handiwork. In some cases, the affinity is blatant: the choir sings three songs from West’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo, changing their sometimes-risqué lyrics so as not to offend. But West’s fingerprints are everywhere, even on the songs he didn’t write. Read More |
“Where Do You Get that Living Water?” Understanding the Risks to Water Quality
Even when we're talking about normal, “acceptable” levels of pollutants in our water, we have serious problems. In northwest Indiana, the chemical pollutants of concern include pesticides and agricultural nutrients, pharmaceuticals, industry-related heavy metals, and plastics. Read More |
I would retreat after school to that corner chair to read and reread the story for myself. I would stop, just before Heidi and Peter bit into their lunch up in the mountains, and go to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of milk and grab some cheese and bread to bring back to the living room. Even if I suspected that homogenized, pasteurized cow's milk, store-bought white bread, and Velveeta slices on a plastic plate were not quite what they were dining on in the mountain meadow, I was there with them.” Read More |