Spiritual Sunday
My wife Julia has been telling me about a book that she’s reading, Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. The thesis of the book seems to be that overeating, like other compulsions and obsessions, is a means of escaping a spiritual emptiness. Or to put it another way, [...]
Posted in 20th Century, Novel, Religion | Also tagged "When Death Comes", Dubliners, Emptiness, English Patient, Hunger, James Joyce, Mary Oliver, Michael Ondaatje, Nikos Kazantzakis, Religion, Zorba the Greek |
Gerard Houckgeest, Old Church Delft (1654)
Spiritual Sunday
Thanks to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion for alerting me to this wonderful passage from John Updike’s “Churchgoing” (which appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1962):
There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could [...]
Chidi Okoye (Nigeria)
Spiritual Sunday
I refute Berkeley thus, Samuel Johnson famously said. And kicked a rock.
Bishop Berkeley was the 18th century idealist philosopher who asked how we know reality is really there if we are dependent upon our senses for perceiving it. Is the rock in existence when we turn our backs?
Johnson’s argument isn’t a philosophical [...]
Posted in 20th Century, Spirituality, poetry | Also tagged "To Be Alive", Bishop Berkeley, Dance, Gregory Orr, Lucille Clifton, materialism, Religion, Samuel Johnson, Science |
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Film Friday
A film doesn’t have to be masterpiece to help us at critical times in our lives. For instance, La Bamba may be a so-so biopic about rock legend Ritchie Valens, but it opened my eyes to the difficulties of being a second child. In Ritcie’s younger brother I saw [...]
The bobolink, Dickinson’s sexton and chorister
Spiritual Sunday
“Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” instructs the fourth commandment. How are we to keep it holy? Emily Dickinson, a writer who wrestled with the stern Calvinism of her day, observed the sabbath in her own way. She was a private person who was skeptical of doctrine as she sought communion [...]
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Spiritual Sunday
What would attract the father of the nuclear bomb to a devotional poet like George Herbert?
That J. Robert Oppenheimer was drawn to the 17th-century Anglican rector I learn from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird (a former Carleton classmate of mine) and Martin J. [...]
One of my favorite Christmas stories when I was growing up was Raymond Macdonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang.” I write today to figure out why. You can click here to read it.
The story is about a church with a tower so high that no one can see the top. It is reputed to house [...]
