Friday, March 20th, 2009
Mark your calendars!!!
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
will be at Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday evening May 6
Leading a conversation on his book:
NEW MONASTICISM:
WHAT IT HAS TO SAY TO TODAY’S CHURCH
Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=50272647267
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
OK… so once again, we’re a day behind on getting this podcast out…
This time we’re going to try splitting the podcast into two segments. The first segment will be a news alamanac and the second will feature an excerpt from the audio archives of Doulos Christou Books.
Overview of Segment #1 – News Almanac
Books Featured:
Other books mentioned:
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
From the audio archives of Doulos Christou Books, here is Part 2 of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s talk “The Monastic Impulse and the God Movement in America” from the 2007 conference “Inhabiting the Church.”
Book Featured:
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
“The Faith of the Cross
and The Virtue of Dialogue“
A Review of
Reasoning Together:
A Conversation on Homosexuality.
by Ted Grimsrud and Mark Nation.
By Chris Smith.
Reasoning Together:
A Conversation on Homosexuality.
by Ted Grimsrud and Mark Nation.
Paperback: Herald Press, 2008.
Buy now from:
[ Doulos Christou Books $16 ] [ Amazon ]
“[T]he
and in the virtue of dialogue.”
– St. Cyprian (c. 200-258)
Here at Englewood Christian Church, one of the Christian practices that has been most formational for our life together is dialogue. For the last thirteen years or so, since we nixed our Sunday evening service and began to circle up chairs and to talk together about the nature of our faith, conversation has become increasingly important in our relationships with one another and in our relationships with others outside our church. Sometimes we reach the point of intense disagreements in our conversations, but in these times we are reminded that the uniting work of the Spirit is stronger than the forces of our disagreements. I was therefore very excited when I heard about Herald Press’s release of Reasoning Together: A Conversation on Homosexuality, and its promise of dialogue on one of the most emotional and divisive issues in the Church today. My experience has been that calm, thoughtful and respectful dialogue on this issue is almost non-existent. Reasoning Together is an excellent book that captures the conversations between two Mennonite scholars: Ted Grimsrud, a professor of theology and peace studies at
The conversation unfolds over the course of the book in the following format: an introductory essay by each scholar, a lengthy essay from both authors defending their position with response and counter-response, followed by two rounds of questions from each author with responses by the other author, and the conversation concludes with a chapter describes the “common ground” that the authors share. I will not recount for you here all the twists and turns that this dialogue takes, but perhaps it will be beneficial to summarize the authors’ points of agreement, as named in the final chapter, because these points provide a framework for the shape of this conversation: (more…)
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
A Thanksgiving
John Henry Newman
(1801-1890)
LORD , in this dust Thy sovereign voice
First quicken’d love divine;
I am all Thine,–Thy care and choice,
My very praise is Thine.
I praise Thee, while Thy providence
In childhood frail I trace,
For blessings given, ere dawning sense
Could seek or scan Thy grace;
Blessings in boyhood’s marvelling hour,
Bright dreams, and fancyings strange;
Blessings, when reason’s awful power
Gave thought a bolder range;
Blessings of friends, which to my door
Unask’d, unhoped, have come;
And, choicer still, a countless store
Of eager smiles at home.
Yet, LORD , in memory’s fondest place
I shrine those seasons sad,
When, looking up, I saw Thy face
In kind austereness clad.
I would not miss one sigh or tear,
Heart-pang, or throbbing brow;
Sweet was the chastisement severe,
And sweet its memory now.
Yes! let the fragrant scars abide,
Love-tokens in Thy stead,
Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side
And thorn-encompass’d head.
And such Thy tender force be still,
When self would swerve or stray,
Shaping to truth the froward will
Along Thy narrow way.
Deny me wealth; far, far remove
The lure of power or name;
Hope thrives in straits, in weakness love,
And faith in this world’s shame.
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Sara Weinraub introduces us to the lovely book
THE DAY-TO-DAY LIFE OF ALBERT HASTINGS
http://weatherspoon.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/
I’m charmed by many of the books Princeton Architectural Press publishes. A recent PAP favorite is The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings.
Photographer Kaylynn Deveney struck up a friendship with the then 85-year-old Albert Hastings after becoming his neighbor in Wales. She began to photograph his simple daily acts, asking Hastings to write captions under each of her pictures.
With so much bad news these days, there’s something surprisingly heartening about the pictures that fill this book.
…
Read the full review:
http://weatherspoon.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/
THE DAY-TO-DAY LIFE OF ALBERT HASTINGS.
Kaylynn Deveney.
Hardcover: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
…
Living in an intentional Christian community of university students in college, I was the fella who persistently insisted that faithfulness to Jesus meant buying more organic food, driving less, avoiding Wal-Mart, and gardening year-round. Never was a sincere argument given for why I was wrong in pleading these things, yet the community struggled to seriously pursue them. I had a point, but nobody could muster the time, zeal, or money to live much of it.
Since then I have realized a key ingredient for why I was able to do these things, but others struggled so much to. I am a child of privilege; my parents graciously paid for my college tuition. This freed me from working over 12 hours a week, and so gave time for garden maintenance. And I was financially in a position to buy more organic foods, where my friends in the community were working their way through college. How silly was I to name as sin their inability to afford organic bell peppers! How shallow was my contempt at their inability to devote a couple hours a week to the garden! My convictions about creation-care were spot on, even as I ignored the privilege which let me embody those ideals.
I did not offer to share my money to help them buy healthier food. I did not share my money to free them up from work. I just clanged my idealism without perceiving the structures of privilege and class which allowed me to behave that way. May God help me to learn the lessons of this…
Read the full review:
http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2009/03/12-marks-of-a-new-elitism-mark-10/
SCHOOL(S) FOR CONVERSION:
12 MARKS OF A NEW MOANSTICISM
Edited by Rutba House.
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2005.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon ]
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=655
…
Renard understands, as the literary theorist Paul Ricoeur has argued, that we are “entangled in stories” and that every thread is worthy of our best effort. He sustains an incredible concentration on the particulars, as though he believes the very force, momentum, and meaning of life to be stowed in the branches of a tree, the depth of a well, the silence of a cemetery, and even the incongruities of one’s laziness, moods, and aspirations, even going so far as to say that a dream “is only life madly dilated.”
All the while, he wins us over by never slackening his precise hold on language, and never glossing the grim realities of finitude and sorrow. Death, God, memory, beauty, and truth are featured in each month of each year, casting Renard as a kind of precursor to French existentialism, though without the clove cigarettes, pomp, embittered atheism, and amphetamines, “I am in no great hurry to see the society of the future [. . . .] What most surprises me is this heart which keeps on beating.” He even plants his own play of surprise when he admits, “Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.” He doesn’t overstate the tragic side of familial angst (even if he had his reasons), but still says of his mother with a shudder, “How will I manage to pass from her life to her death while being aware of it?” And he does not overlook the loving miracle that is his wife, Marinette, bestowing on her the highest compliment a writer can muster: “You have prevented me from becoming a satiric poet.”
The manifold ability to close the distance between literary skill and lived reality, without boasting about it, is perhaps the reason why the name Renard has been a shibboleth of sorts among writer’s writers who, with Nietzsche, would confess, “We want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.” Previous incarnations of The Journal have passed through the hands of Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, Somerset Maugham, and others. Michael Silverblatt calls it “a secret book.” And as Cheston Knapp of Tin House remarks, “After I read The Journal, the stakes of making art became higher for me, the borders expanded, the depths deepened.” Indeed, what contemporary art needs is a recovery of the tempered romanticism that seems to exude from the pen of Jules Renard, despite his best efforts to contain it. Art is not a matter of self-expression or capitalist venture; rather, it is alive. It is the point at which the divisions between subject and object are removed, where art and artist become one, not in the sense that art is a an expression of the individual artist, but as the active participation in what is at once within and beyond the artist’s grasp. It is this fresh encounter with reality, a reality that is not self-contained, that Renard offers the modern artist—indeed, offers us all.
Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=655
THE JOURNAL OF JULES RENARD.
Paperback: Tin House Books, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $16 ] [ Amazon ]
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Mark your calendars!!!
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
will be at Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday evening May 6
Leading a conversation on his book:
NEW MONASTICISM:
WHAT IT HAS TO SAY TO TODAY’S CHURCH
Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=50272647267
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Some excellent Wendell Berry videos here to kick off the video portion of our multimedia Tuesdays.
First and foremost, you do not want to miss this excellent show from Kentucky Public Television where Wendell Berry interviews Bill McKibben about Bill’s recent book Deep Economy. I’m bummed that we can’t actually post the video here, but you should click here and go watch this video.
(It is an hour long, so if you want to watch the whole thing, you’ll need to carve out some time!)
Wendell Berry reads a recent poem (early 2009):
Brian McLaren reads one of Wendell Berry’s poems:
Friday, March 6th, 2009
“Far Beyond the House and Chicken Yard“
A Review of
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor.
by Brad Gooch.
By Chris Smith.
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor.
Brad Gooch.
Hardcover: Little, Brown and Co., 2009.
Buy now from:
[ Doulos Christou Books $24 ] [ Amazon ]
A recent viral internet post has declared Flannery O’Connor among its list of “Stuff Christian Hipsters Like.” While I can understand why such Christian Hipsters would be attracted to her dark, grotesque stories of sin and redemption, I am more convinced than ever – after reading Flannery, Brad Gooch’s authoritative new biography – that there is little in Flannery herself that such trendy folks would find “hip.” A sheltered, southern woman from an aristocratic family, with “medieval” sensibilities and a cultural racism (334) befitting her situation in mid-twentieth century
The product of Gooch’s lifelong “infatuation” with Ms. O’Connor’s work and five years of research and writing, Flannery contradicts O’Connor’s opinion that a compelling biography of her life would never be written “because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Gooch’s framework is the standard story of O’Connor’s life, developed largely from her autobiography-in-letters, The Habit of Being. (more…)
Friday, March 6th, 2009
“Part Science Text, Part Horror Story“
A Review of
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee
and the Coming Agricultural Crisis.
by Rowan Jacobsen.
By Mary Bowling.
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee
and the Coming Agricultural Crisis.
Rowan Jacobsen.
Hardback: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Buy now from:
[ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]
Rowan Jacobsen’s book Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of The Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis is part science text, part horror story and certainly a cautionary tale aimed at a global audience. In a time when huge-scale economies are the driving force behind agriculture, farmers and beekeepers alike have felt enormous pressure to grow not food primarily, but rather business. A small farm cannot compete to support itself, not with all of the inputs necessary to make it run, like seed, fertilizer, pesticides and plenty of heavy machinery, not to mention the farmer’s time and transportation costs. Likewise, a small apiary (bee farm) cannot compete with the ridiculously low price consumers pay for foreign honey. Factor in the multitude of uncertainties that come with keeping bees and the similarly high price of inputs, and it’s a wonder anyone is still even willing to try to produce honey.
But honey is not really what most bee farms are about anymore. Honey used to be regarded as the most important product of a beehive, but in recent years and with recent trends in agriculture, pollination is as important as anything else in farming. For years, small farms and beehives co-existed, with bees doing their work almost invisibly and providing their rich rewards to people without a whole lot of fuss. But when farms decided to go big, the scale became such that bees couldn’t effectively pollinate crops on their own and pollinator rental became common, even necessary. Now bees are responsible for making billions of dollars worth of food possible each year in the U.S., and by traveling constantly from one huge mono-crop to another when the season is right, honeybees have come to function as both marathon runners and workhorses.
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