God, Guilt, and Aronofsky’s Noah, Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about the film Noah and the believing soul’s ambivalence to God. Today I want to quickly note that in his book God, Guilt and Death, Merold Westphal describes how there is actually...
View ArticleRighteous Minds Left and Right
The orthodontist’s new office has a waiting room tricked out with video games—even a genuine old tabletop Mrs. Pac-Man. Grace and I were racing cars—and she was winning by more than a lap—when the...
View ArticleThe Creationist Crisis Reprise
Several months ago I blogged about the Ken Ham Bill Nye debate at Liberty University. I hadn’t given the two much thought since then until last week when they both rose back into the media. My son’s...
View ArticleThe Demons That Possess Us
When I graduated from Seattle Pacific’s MFA program, I was sorely disappointed to hear Greg Wolfe announce The Brothers Karamazov as the next common reading selection. Upon returning home from my final...
View ArticlePasternak: Artist and Holy Fool
As I read the essay “The Writer and the Valet” in my latest issue of the London Review of Books, an image came to mind of a T-shirt I saw in one of the random catalogs that come in the mail. It was a...
View ArticleHannah Graham and a Silence too Loud
It was forty degrees this morning when I got into my car. The back window was spotted white with frost. As I drove to work, a new appeal came from news that had made me heartsick for weeks. It was a...
View ArticleWho Needs to Read Anymore?
At the community college where I teach—actually in the state capitol two hours away—a massive overhaul of the English curriculum is underway. As I understand it right now, a diagnostic test will...
View ArticleWhile My Pen Gently Weeps
My daughter Gracie was helping me prepare dinner one evening. We were doing the bœuf bourguignon from Virginia Willis’s amazing cookbook Bon Appetit, Y’all, which puts a southern spin on every...
View ArticleThe Boy Who Lived Large
Friday we took the kids and hit the road for Aiken, South Carolina. We were going down to attend a memorial service for my sister’s stepson Tyler. Tyler was sixteen years old. The service was nice. The...
View ArticleThe Evidence of Things Not Seen
Since I’ve been blogging here at Good Letters I have been contacted by several friends who knew me back when I was a Baptist. My friend Heidi asked, “Are you a universalist now?” Cliff wondered if I...
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