• Film/TV - Religion

    And in the End, Love: Matthew Richardson’s Gay “Hallelujah” Dance

    October 31, 2021 - By 

    One of the great temptations in this Age of Vitriol is to grow so weary and exasperated that we seek release, turning willfully away from the darkness, covering our eyes and ears to all that we fear is gaining an upper hand every time we dare tune into the State of the World. “Can we talk about…politics for just a minute?” is a common refrain across dinner tables and Happy Hours, rendered tenuously, though with an underlying urgency, as we seek to balance the competing needs for engagement and retreat from the ever-present, often oppressive affairs of the day. The…

  • Fiction - Religion

    Engineeered Apocalypse: Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God”

    October 24, 2021 - By 

    The end of the world has weighed heavily on the mind of humankind since we emerged onto the 4.5-billion-year-old planet we call home some 200,000 years ago. Variations on the apocalypse have coursed through every form of expression since we started painting on cave walls, blinking into each dawn, cowering from storms and eclipses, imagining all-powerful gods to whom we might appeal for benevolence and mercy. A kind of existential angst and sometimes outright terror underlies much of the literature and other arts that have emerged over the eons to grapple with the specter of not only our own lives…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    Ecstasy Fast & Slow

    October 17, 2021 - By 

    A modern wedding scene on the dance floor, amidst the mostly late ’20s-early ’30s crowd that are peers of the newly betrothed. It’s been a couple hours since the vows and dinner and multiple, somewhat long-winded toasts that seem to have become an obligatory feature of weddings today. (“I first met Sam in third grade when…”) Then comes the new hubby-wifey dance to their own special song, its dying notes prompting the DJ to finally crank up the music and the pace as all the waiting young’uns and no small number of old’uns stream onto the dance floor. (It’s early…

  • Poetry - Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    For the Broken-Winged Bee In Search of Its Hive

    October 10, 2021 - By 

                  FOR THE BROKEN-WINGED BEE IN SEARCH OF ITS HIVE                                          By Andrew Hidas Such nobility in its helplessness, Not desperate, merely determined, Heeding no other impulse, Following no other program But the relentless quest To rejoin its mates and Once again serve its queen. Crossing vast swaths of concrete, Like a nomad in the Sahara Shorn of water and shade, Exposed and alone in the world. Surely, such an epic endeavor Deserves no less…

  • Poetry

    Two Autumn Poems by Two “Robert”s

    October 2, 2021 - By 

    Fall descended on Durham recently like someone turned a key and announced, “New season, step up now, no dallying!” It had been summer-hot and sticky per usual through most all August and the first three weeks of September. Then came the autumn equinox on the 22nd with a full day of intermittent rain, and early the next morning, upon opening the door to the sun porch, “Whoa! Where’s my sweatshirt?” Sure, days are still getting up in the mid-to-upper 80s with that nice penetrating fall warmth that somehow never feels hot, but the heat and especially the humidity have begun leaching from…