A Sound of Sheer Silence

Six years is not a long time.  I've now lived in Columbus for six years, and it seems like a blink of an eye since I was living out on the West Coast.  But not all blocks of six years are created equal.  Six years in your thirties, as the last six years have been for me, is not the same thing as six years when you are younger.  Context and timing matter. From August 1990 to August 1996, I lived in Jacksonville, Florida.  That period of six years corresponded with my two years of middle school and my four years of high school.  I was 12 at the beginning of that period and 18 when it ended.  There is an argument to be made that this is the most significant six year period in any person's life, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is the most significant period of my life, by far.  And it was spent entirely in a strange place called Jacksonville, Florida. If you have never been to Jacksonville, you probably have certain associations with "Fl...

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”   (Matthew 8:18-22). A couple of weeks ago, I talked about ghosts .  In the event that you were skeptical of the power of the ghosts of the pasts, you should no longer be after watching what unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia on Friday and Saturday.  Ghosts of the past, ghosts that many (wrongly, naively) thought were dead and buried came to life.   Ghosts took the life Heather Heyer , a martyr for justice.  Ghosts were everywhere, and their power was unmistakable. In the face of this horror, there were rays of li...

1. One of my favorite movies, and a movie I will defend to the death, is The Fountain.   The conventional wisdom is that The Fountain  (2006) was a weird misstep in director Darren Aronofsky's career between the critically acclaimed, commercially successful hits Requiem for a Dream  (2000) and The Wrestler  (2008) (and, later Black Swan (2010)).  That conventional wisdom is wrong-- The Fountain is every bit as good as those films (and I think better than Requiem and Black Swan , though I really like those films).  It is, I will admit, less accessible than some of his other films--it doesn't have a conventional narrative structure, but instead intertwines three related stories.  But if you take the time to work through what is going on, it will reward you. [Also, a quick aside--the soundtrack to The Fountain  by Clint Mansell and Kronos Quartet, is absolutely fantastic.  Even if you don't see the movie, listen to the soundtrack--it i...

I just finished Diarmaid MacCulloch's new book All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy , which I felt was timely and appropriate as we approach the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses.  And I am glad I did, because the book is brilliant and insightful (and more accessible than his massive previous book The Reformation: A History ).  There are a number of things that you can talk about with regard to the book, but one thing that struck me from reading it was how the Reformation presented a fundamental choice for Christianity, and how we are still wrestling with the legacy of those choices. To understand the nature of the choice, we should go back and think about Augustine.   In the Original Blessing series  of posts from last month, we looked at how Augustine sees the physical world as being fundamentally corrupted by the sin of Adam, and how physicality itself as the locus of the human problem generally.   This view create...

1. Perhaps you are not familiar with the liturgical clothing item called an amice.  If not, here is a definition, courtesy of Wikipedia: The amice consists of a white cloth connected to two long ribbon-like attachments, by which it is fastened around the shoulders of the priest. Before the liturgical reforms of 1972, its use was mandatory for all Roman Catholic Masses, but it is only required today if the alb does not cover the priest's ordinary clothing. Many priests choose to wear the amice for reasons of tradition or to prevent damage to their other vestments due to perspiration. For the more visually inclined, here is an example: I have never seen a Catholic priest wear an amice.  I had assumed that it was basically a completely archaic item, joining such exotica as the fiddleback chausable . Why am I bringing this up?  Two Sundays ago, the rector at the Episcopal Church I attend began a sermon series on the liturgical vestments and their me...

Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware's twitter feed directed my attention to  this excellent article , written by Jem Bloomfield.  Mr. Bloomfield is a British academic, and he makes three points that I think are critical in thinking and talking about the interaction between Christianity, the broader "secular" culture, and in particular the younger slice of that culture.  But it also interacts in a way with people who are searching for some sort of "third way" on the contested issues of sexuality, most recently in the form of Fr. Jim Martin's book Building a Bridge , which was based on a talk he gave last fall and which I talked about here . Before turning to the article, it's worthwhile to get the "whatabout"-ist objections out the way (some of which can be seen in the comments section of the post).  Yes, "secular culture" is not a monolithic entity, and neither are Millennials/young people.  There are quite a number of young people who are very...

I've taken a while to get out this post, the final one in a series talking about Rev. Shroyer's book Original Blessing  (first two posts here and here ), because I've changed my mind about the book in the interim.  Well, that's not quite right.  It's less that I no longer have the concerns about some parts of the book that I had when I first read it and more that I increasingly think that those concerns are not all that important to the overall narrative of the book and the questions it is trying to answer.  The more I think about and reflect on the book and what it is trying to do, the more I think the places where I agree with it are far, far more significant than the ways that I would frame some things differently. In that light, let me (finally) cut the chase and talk about the part of the book that gave me pause.  In the book, Rev. Shroyer calls us to make a decisive move away from the Augustine formulation sketched out in the first post and to replace i...