"I wanted to open a bookstore that would contain the best of what had
been thought and written," says Warren Farha of Eighth Day Books. It's "an impossible goal, but that was the guiding
telos of the store."
“For decades there has been a premium on language as subject,” says poet Christian Wiman. But recently poets are “trying to find some way of speaking of ‘ultimate things’ with some sort of credibility.”
While I was finishing my Ph.D. I took a job as an adjunct
professor at a small, state-run college. The experience was a lesson in
humility. Most of the time, fancy graduate degree or not, I was treated like a
cog in a machine--and a suspicious cog at that.
When Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth studied revolutions that
had occurred over a period of more than 100 years and across the globe, they found
that nonviolent revolutions are twice as likely as violent ones to succeed.
Chenoweth explains
that nonviolent revolutions attract a greater range of the population and
create a higher likelihood of defection among supporters of a particular
regime.
I cringed when I read Jeffrey MacDonald's accusation, quoted
here by Steve Thorngate, that Americans have turned Lent into a spiritual
self-help event "whose effectiveness is measured by how well it entertains us
and affirms what we already believe."
Olga Grushin is the author of two critically acclaimed novels,The Dream Life of Sukhanov and The Line. Both grapple with the legacy of the Soviet Union and the depths of human character. Raised in Moscow, Grushin was the first Soviet citizen to graduate from a U.S. university after the cold war. She now lives in Washington, D.C.
Olga Grushin offers her characters the dignity of their dreams. She is not impatient with their restless searching, and she does not dictate an outcome.
The
urge for Lent started for me several weeks ago. I was out on a cross-country
ski with a friend when a small herd of elk ran in front of our path, kicking up
a cloud of snow. They were so close that we could see their breath as they
passed. When they reached the crest of a small hill, they turned collectively
toward us and paused for a moment before running on.
Learning to see in new ways is one of the most difficult tasks of the transformed life. Old habits of selective vision, old choices about what to leave out and what to focus on tend to dominate us, even as we search for new ways of living that are in closer communion with the life of the Spirit. Transfiguration--that mysterious transformation of vision that is narrated in today's readings--is a radical, if brief, way of illumination.
In the opening scene of this new novel, the protagonist,
Golden Richards, comes home from work to one of the three houses where his four
wives and 28 children live, and he literally cannot find a pot to piss in. The
bathrooms, of which there are never enough, are all occupied. The house is in
disarray and chaos.
While producing award-winning chocolate, Shawn Askinosie seeks to create a business in which everyone involved—from farmer to factory worker to buyer—thrives.
I have become a BBC Middle East addict.
I check in every few hours to see updated reports of what is happening in
Egypt. I cannot get enough of the freshness of their reporting, their insightful
and personal commentary and their somewhat cynical take on the world's
governments.
In an interview with Oxford professor Michael Willis
about Tunisia, Radio Free Europe correspondent Hossein Aryan noted that "there
has not been a religious dimension to the unrest" in the Middle East. This is
quickly becoming the conventional wisdom.
The community meal our church hosts--a modest operation that
serves four free meals a week to about 50 guests--has recently lost its main
source of donations. For several years, we've received big boxes of discarded
produce--lettuce, peppers, asparagus, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, whatever was
being gleaned from the store shelves--from our local chain grocery.
Americans have become accustomed to picking and choosing among religious traditions and practices. But some have taken religious pluralism in a deeper and more radical direction.
As is so often
the case in these situations, the only part of the National Portrait Gallery's
show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" that I have
seen is the part dubbed "offensive" and removed from the exhibition thanks to
the Catholic League's William Donohue and a few congressional representatives.
It is 11 seconds of a four-minute video by late artist David Wojn
Last
week Marian Wright Edelman chronicled
the work of Strength to Love, a prisoner reentry program run by the Church of
Christ-Right Now in Washington D.C.
Anna Madsen has regular clients she sees on a freelance basis. One woman "is so hungry for theological conversation that she has booked every Friday until kingdom come."
Books
Room
By Emma Donoghue
The Line
Olga Grushin
The Lonely Polygamist
By Brady Udall
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
By David Mitchell
Great House
By Nicole Krauss
I Curse the River of Time
By Per Petterson, trans. Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson
