• Poetry

    Is “Happiness” Yours? It Could Be “Otherwise” (Two Jane Kenyon Poems)

    September 30, 2022 - By 

    One of the reminders I use for self-consolation and perspective whenever some challenging condition or situation has me appealing to the heavens for relief is, “It could always be worse.” It’s an inarguable point, given the sheer awfulness of calamities that beset human beings everywhere, each in their own time, some of them occurring now to dear friends even as I type these words. So, an abstraction it most definitely is not. Knowing and acknowledging we’re a long way from the bottom of suffering’s barrel is also a convenient means of maintaining humility, which is among the most treasured (and necessary!)…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #32:
    Susan Werner’s “May I Suggest”

    September 18, 2022 - By 

    I thought about appending the song discussed here as the musical selection to last week’s post on C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in War-Time” sermon, but I was so struck with the lyrics of “May I Suggest” that I found myself wanting to take the deeper dive that is the purpose of this “Brilliant Songs” series. So here we go… In its lyrics, “May I Suggest” can be seen as a kind of companion to “Learning in War-Time.” It goes Lewis’s case—for the value of intellectual inquiry, art and beauty no matter what the world situation is—one better by making an overt,…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    The Illusion of “Normal” Life:
    C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in War-Time”

    September 11, 2022 - By 

    There are times in life when everything we perceive as “normal” about it screeches to a halt. We’re at work or at the park with our 2-year-old, lazily pushing him on the swing when the call comes in—a loved one has suffered a calamity. We hustle home, throw a few things in a bag and either start making flight arrangements or hop in the car, “dropping everything.” Time and every other obligation and interest as we know it fades, and we enter an altered inner landscape where only one thing seems to matter. Or does it? On September 1, 1939,…

  • Film/TV - Religion

    The Tragicomedy of “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”

    September 4, 2022 - By 

    Many critics are lumping Adamma Ebo’s “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” into the comedy genre, and suggest the movie should have stuck to its lane in drawing laughs at the hypocrisy and thinly disguised greed on display with a certain kind of evangelical megachurch pastor who at best has his hands in your pocket and at worst isn’t looking only for money when he’s fishing around in there. Yes, there are plenty of cringey laughs at the usual sendups of avaricious preachers in expensive suits and palatial homes pounding away at a “prosperity gospel” that reserves most all the…