John
January 23, 2021
Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
November 23, 2020
“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
October 31, 2020
Dwight Moody, the great revivalist, appreciated fire and brimstone. He knew nothing better, he said, than the notion “that Our Lord is coming again” to “take the men of this world out of their stocks and bonds.” As a preacher, he knew it worked, that it moved souls.
May 14, 2020
Making readers like me of George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin highly uncomfortable, a San Diego company has developed a technology to monitor social distance. Already in use in some places, it’s called Active Distance Alert and Monitoring, or ADAM, eerily, for short. The technology maps signals emitted by phones, so that crowded areas like grocery stores […]
May 21, 2022
I have long been a reader and have learned much from Julia Kristeva, a profound thinker, a philosopher, a literary critic, a poststructuralist, and a feminist in somewhat the French style. It is her work and writing as a psychoanalyst, however, that’s had the most influence on me.
March 3, 2024
“[T]he cathedral provokes a contemptuous world.”[1] That’s a line from a little poem by Rilke; it’s something Rodin had said. Rilke, the poet, for a time worked for Rodin, the sculptor, until they had a falling out as artists often do.
April 21, 2024
You’ve often heard me say how our experience of Christianity, of the Church, is so very different from the Church of the past, from the Christianities of long ago.
April 27, 2024
We must be quite careful how we interpret these words of Jesus. John’s gospel is in every syllable a mystical text, and so one must take care not to read these words superficially or to misread them entirely.