“The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work.”
Not all popular culture is utterly disposable to the alert Bible scholar. In fact, some of it – from the works of Salman Rushdie to the music of Emmylou Harris – can be downright durable.
Perhaps it’s time to retire this quaint gesture — the writer’s shock that an artist has found matter other than in the agreed-upon precincts. Life is interesting all over. Every life, properly understood, is compelling. Anyone aspiring to be an artist knows there’s no such thing as why-bother or nothing-to-see.
Eliza Griswold: The belief that there is one and only one way to find God, and the understanding that that leads immediately to an enemy, because everybody else is wrong. That kind of binary division between us and them, the saved and the damned, I wondered if that was inherently violent because you were setting yourself against another person.
The author of “The Family” and the new book “C Street” visited with Episcopal Café about his research. Conversation ranged from the secretive work of Doug Coe to the potential for genocide in Uganda.
No question facing the Anglican Communion today is more explosive that the present and future of Muslim Christian relations. Eliza Griswold’s new book, The Tenth Parallel, Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is a must read for anyone seriously wishing to explore this subject.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Harper Lee’s novel. It spoke in fine moral tones about racism with utter clarity, and it’s never been out of print.
This book of theodicy, disguised as a number of other things, continues to dominate.
No thinker, however great, can foreclose the possibility of further thought, different and contrary thought, and surely none of them would wish to foreclose it.
Because the House of Bishops has its own regular meeting, and its own College for Bishops, it’s not surprising to learn that many bishops read the same books over a given year. And it’s always interesting to find out what’s on the reading list, because the ideas tend to surface in public again and again.