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Bimbo No More
2007-12-28 17:04:00
This health story from specialty-foods purveyor Vital Choice is the best news I've heard in a while: Curvy Women and their Babies Test a Bit Smarter Women with heftier hips and thighs test smarter, as do their kids; Cognitive edge is attributed to the higher omega-3 levels in lower-body fat by Craig Weatherby People?s perceptions of female beauty range widely across the world, and Western cultures? standards for womanly allure changed dramatically in the decades following World War II.Nowadays, being thin is in, with the linear figures of top fashion models getting so slim as to incite official attempts to bar underweight models and their starvation-style diet regimens.There?s little doubt that women with smaller waists bigger hips and thighs ? proportions that researchers call a ?low waist-hip ratio? ? have long constituted the female ideal. From ancient India and Persia to classical-era Greece and Rome, up through the 19th century, portrayals of ideal women were curvaceous female...
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Christmas Carol: Sing a Different Song
2007-12-25 10:43:00
Sing a different song now Christmas is here,sing a song of people knowing God's near:The Messiah is born in the face of our scorn,sing a different song to welcome and warn.Shout a different shout now Christmas is here,shout a shout of joy and genuine cheer:Fill the earth and the sky with the news from on high,shout a different shout that all may come by.Love a different love now Christmas is here,love without condition, love without fear:With the humble and poor, with the shy and unsure,love a different love. Let Christ be the cure!Dance a different dance now Christmas is here,dance a dance of war on suffering and fear:Peace and justice are one, in the light of the sun,Dance a different dance, God's reign has begun!Music: Different Song John Bell (20th C)Words: The Iona Community (20th C)Hear the music here. Merry Christmas!
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Readings for Christmas Eve: Darkness and Light
2007-12-24 13:20:00
The Christmas season is a time of contrasts. In a dark cold night, the light of a star offers hope. The King of Kings is born in a humble manger. The church's Advent readings draw this contrast even sharper. When the society around us is celebrating with holly-jolly cartoon characters and piles of presents, we're asked to think about repentance, prophecy and the end times. Why dwell on sin and death as preparation for Christ's birth? Otherwise we would miss the true world-colliding awesomeness of the event. "Peace on earth, goodwill to humankind," we say, as if good intentions made it so. But peace and solidarity are fragile flames, always in danger of being blown out by the dark winds of violence, power struggles and prejudice. Forget this and we forget to shield them against the enemies that arise within and without. God as infant is not merely born into love and cuddles, but into all the vulnerability of being human in a sinful world. Like all of us, he is born to di...
More About: Bible , Readings , Light , Episcopal

Elisha Porat: "Metamorphosis"
2007-12-19 14:54:00
        ; To the memory of Arieh LaholaHe did not attempt to saw the barsbut carried his cage around on his back:days, nights, years, ages.And when the gleam of the water beckoned,the small pleasant ripples tempting him,its heavy weight pulled him to the depths.He did not kick and did not railjust sank, succumbing tothe river: resigned, passive, estranged,so far from the Land of Israel.He did not chant and did not speak,language deserted him in the bubblesempty, soft, dizzying.His throat was waterlogged and hechoked, stifled, was transformedand floated, voiceless and without language:A rhythmic hum emanated from him,his swollen legs twitchedand his arms beat like those of a drummer.     &nb sp;  Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy EisnerRead more work by Israeli poet Elisha Porat in the journal Deep South, from which this poem is reprinted by permission. Deep South is a publication of the University of Otago, Ne...
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Remembering Dorothy L. Sayers
2007-12-17 18:07:00
Mystery writer and Christian apologist Dorothy L. Sayers died on this date in 1957, and is commemorated in a very informative thumbnail bio at The Daily Office. More reflections on her work can be found at the blog Dead Christians Society. Her 1940 lecture "Creed or Chaos?" is a bracing rebuke to "enlightened" Westerners who would like to have religious sentiment without doctrinal clarity. As later postmodern critics of liberalism were to point out, everyone has a creed, a set of core beliefs about the nature of humanity and the universe, on which we base our political, ethical and economic choices. The historical context of her speech -- Europe facing the rising Nazi threat -- reminds us how high the stakes can be. Sayers argues: While there is a superficial consensus about the ethics of behaviour, we can easily persuade ourselves that the underlying dogma is immaterial. We can, as we cheerfully say, "agree to differ." "Never mind about theology," we observe in ...
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More Thoughts on the Prose-Poem
2007-12-17 17:29:00
In the latest issue of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry, my friend Ellen LaFleche reflects on how the prose-poem genre, occupying a space that is betwixt and between, can be especially fruitful for exploring the identity disruptions produced by illness: I experience diabetes as a disease that lives on and between boundaries. For example, the person newly diagnosed with diabetes is told that they have "control" over the disease process. Achieving this "control" involves a difficult regime of diet, exercise, self-education, glucose monitoring, frequent labwork, and numerous visits to specialists. But diabetes is also a progressive disease, a reality that even the most dedicated diabetic cannot change. And even someone with tight control over their blood glucose levels can experience complications. So the idea of "control" is both a reality and an illusion. Some experts claim that diabetes can even be "reversed" with various dietary supplements such as cinnamon capsul...
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Support Prisoner Re-entry Programs
2007-12-10 12:38:00
The Episcopal Public Policy Network is urging members to contact their U.S. senators in support of the Second Chance Act (Senate Bill 1060), which would give federal funding to state programs that rehabilitate prisoners and ease their re-entry into the community. These programs offer literacy and job training, drug treatment, and other mental and physical health services. The bill passed the House of Representatives this fall. Read more about it in Episcopal Life Online.In other prison-reform news, Thousand Kites, a dialogue project on the U.S. criminal justice system, tomorrow will host its "Calls From Home" national radio broadcast for prisoners. Call their toll-free line (888-396-1208) Dec. 11 from 3 PM to 11 PM Eastern time to record your message to an incarcerated friend or family member. Messages will be included in a broadcast to over 120 radio stations across the country. Find out more here.
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Violence Erupts Over Gay Jesus Art
2007-12-09 17:56:00
  Kittredge Cherry reports on her Jesus In Love blog about violence that broke out at an exhibit of photos by Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin: A group of young people tried to set fire to a poster at the cultural center that was exhibiting her photos of a queer Christ. Staff intervened and as many as 30 people joined the fight, according to news reports.The recent melee broke out over her Ecce Homo series, which recreates scenes from Christ?s life in a contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) context. The conflict occurred in the Swedish city of Jonkoping, known as a center of evangelical Christianity.Wallin's "Sermon on the Mount" is one of my favorite images from Cherry's book Art That Dares, which I blogged about in August. Buy a copy and sign up for the Jesus In Love newsletter here.More provocative and enlightening images from Ohlson's Ecce Homo series can be viewed on her website. The AIDS-victim Pieta and the gay-bashing crucifi...
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Episcopal Diocese Secedes Over Gay Issue
2007-12-09 17:15:00
The Fresno, CA-based Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin yesterday became the first full diocese to split from the national church over disagreements about the Bible 's view of homosexuality. The diocese, which is also one of the three US Episcopal dioceses that rejects the ordination of women, voted to place itself under the authority of a conservative South American congregation. Over 50 Episcopal parishes have seceded from the national church in the past few years to protest the trend toward recognition of gay relationships. CNN.com has the full story here. I find it sad and ironic that in the name of upholding "tradition", certain Episcopal congregations are playing fast and loose with our entire system of church governance, as well as dishonoring their vows to respect the authority of their bishop. There are many Protestant denominations that operate on a more congregationalist model, where individual churches are free to reshuffle their allegian...
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Signs of the Apocalypse: Holiday Edition
2007-12-08 19:17:00
Ship of Fools has posted its "Kitschmas Gifts" list, featuring 13 products to make your special someone say "WTF??" My favorite are the Thongs of Praise. Nothing says "Not tonight dear, I have a headache" like panties with the Virgin Mary on them.Not to be outdone, The Onion's holiday gift guide includes essentials like Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. (Not recommended for people with dogs.)For the second year in a row, Going Jesus treats us to the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. Paddleball Nativity, Leprechauns in the Manger, Sad Kittens Nativity and more!
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Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online
2007-12-06 11:01:00
  Online literary journal Poem eleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning. Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems ?merely? physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, ...
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"The Race Unwon" and Other New Writing by "Conway"
2007-12-03 17:24:00
My prison pen pal "Conway", who is serving 25-to-life at a maximum-security facility in California for receiving stolen goods, has sent me another packet of exciting new work this month:The Race Unwonby ConwayLike withered old leaves on a Hanged mans treeabsorbing the useless sun'light they saveto power only an abandoned memoryinside dreary chill shadows of his gravewith unquenching air recycled-n-staleour sun was walled out of existenceunable to recover warmth from the veilbrought on by the shame of persistenceunnatural walls, kneeling left pleadingyet still a judgment remains sittingamong the rubble of babylons leadingthrown-up, jumbled enormous forbiddingIn these volumes of created humanitynecromanced from the living deadBaptized by fire with insanityrunning cold as the blood being shed.Chase me away from their stencherase their stench from meI've no more vengeance to quenchnor do I desire this bitter memorythough the waves still sing your songover & over with pounding pain...
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Book Notes: Openly Gay Openly Christian
2007-12-02 21:56:00
Rev. Samuel Kader's Openly Gay Openly Christian : How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly bridges the gap between serious Bible-believing Christians and those who want to affirm gay and lesbian relationships. The latter group includes liberal churches and theologians whose relationship to the Bible is vague, superficial or outright antagonistic, which has tended to confirm conservatives' fears that gay-friendly theology waters down the faith. Many evangelicals have never heard a solid Scriptural case for GLBT inclusion. Kader's scholarly analysis of "clobber passages" in Genesis, Leviticus and the Epistles makes that much-needed case, though in other chapters he repeats familiar pro-gay readings of the Bible that I think are strained and potentially distracting. Hunting for examples of same-sex pairings in the Bible (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) unnecessarily sexualizes all intimate bonds, a reductionism to which our culture has been prone since Freud. Moreover,...
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Saints and Laborers
2007-11-30 18:30:00
One of the pleasures of praying the Daily Office is the juxtaposition of Bible verses, prayers and spiritual readings that makes me reflect on familiar verses in a new way. Yesterday's gospel was the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20:1-16. That's the one where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who pays all his workers the same amount, whether they worked all day or only for an hour. This parable sometimes comforts, sometimes outrages, and always fascinates me. To feel validated as a human being, I need to believe two somewhat contradictory things: that God cares about fairness, and that God loves each of us unconditionally, in some way that doesn't depend on our relative merits. The online Daily Office at Mission St. Clare includes brief biographies of saints and great Christian historical figures. To these, also, I have a complex relationship. Sometimes I feel deeply and personally cared for by these people whom I h...
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Poetry Roundup: Teicher, Rodriguez, Rose
2007-11-25 18:12:00
In the course of researching winners of major contests for the next Winning Writers newsletter, I came across some exceptional poems online that I wanted to share with readers of this blog. One of my New Year's resolutions for 2008 will be to get caught up on my review copies because there are so many exciting new books being published. Here, samples of three very different authors:Jennifer Rose 's second book, Hometown for an Hour, has won several prizes including the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award. Structured as a series of postcards from cities ranging from Gettysburg to Mostar, the book explores experiences of rootlessness and belonging. For instance, in "Provincetown Postcard", she writes:The street's deserted,as if a villain and the sheriff wereabout to shoot it out, though nobodypeers from behind these shuttersexcept the endless pairs of sunglassesstaring toward June. Eight o'clock.A church bell and one foghorn sing an ariaso poignant I want t...
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Juliet OC: "Just This Here Now"
2007-11-22 20:41:00
A member of the British writers' forum ABCTales.com who writes under the pen name Julie t OC has contributed this lyrical, intense story that combines raw emotion with careful literary craft: ?Just this here now? just this here now? just this, here now? just this, here, now,? she whispers the mantra into the incensed air. ?Just this? here? now? only now is important, we only have this moment? just this, here now.? A river rushes past my left ear, it bubbles and fades as distant bells grow closer, like the church on the hill on summer mornings, or cows in an Alpine meadow. The dog collapses into my side, he only lives for now; just this, here now. I screw his fur in my palm, and he throws his head back into my lap as I breathe in on, just this; and out on, here now. I imagine us in a painting, the title; Dying in ecstasy, sub-title; just this here now. My sister snores in the hospital bed as I lie on her ?real? bed, her old bed. She doesn?t lie on it anymore, not even in the daytime....

Robert Orsi: Scholarship as an Act of Love
2007-11-15 15:47:00
  Catholic historian of religion Robe rt A. Orsi delivered the 2007 commencement address at Harvard Divinity School. His speech, "Love in a Time of Distraction", is reprinted on page 8 of the Harvard Divinity Today summer newsletter, online as a PDF file here. This excerpt stood out for me: Scholarship is the practice of disciplined attention to the world as we find the world, in its undeniable otherness and difference, but most of all in its obdurate and resistant presence. It is our privilege in the humanities and social sciences to go as inquirers into the company of other humans in the present and the past. We meet these men and women and children in the archives, in texts and in fragments of texts, and in the field. We find them always in the immediate circumstances of their lives, at work on their worlds; we find them in webs of relationship with each other that come to include us, once we have entered their worlds, in the present and in the past. And we meet the...

The Depressed Christian
2007-11-15 11:09:00
Christians prone to depression, as I am, can feel extra burdens of shame and doubt. We've heard the best news in the world, yet we can hardly motivate ourselves to butter our toast. Are we failing to work the program, or does the program itself not work? Are we setting a bad example in a world already inclined to believe that our faith is useless at best, harmful at worst? Travis Mamone's article The Boy with the Thorn in His Side at Relevant Magazine asks these exact questions. With humor and pathos, he describes how he read The Bible Code last year and became paralyzed with fear that the apocalypse was imminent. Though he eventually debunked that specific worry, he was disturbed by how easily the habit of panic returned, despite his faith: When will this struggle be over? I had been dealing with mental illness for most of my life now, and I was getting sick of it. There was nothing else I wanted more than to just wake up one day and no longer have another anxiety attack. Ev...
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Book Notes: The Gift of Being Yourself
2007-11-13 11:21:00
Christian psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner has written an intriguing but too-brief inspirational volume, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, whose premise is that knowing God is inseparable from knowing yourself. This might sound like New Age self-deification, but Benner's orthodoxy is solid. Relationships require authenticity. If we are afraid to be our true selves, he says, we are also afraid to encounter God in prayer. This observation rang true for me because fear of myself has been a major obstacle to my prayer life. Sometimes it's that I don't want to know my own sins; other times, I'm afraid that I couldn't process the intense emotions of prayer without losing my mental balance. Then the people whose affection I want to retain will reject me, saying, "Who is this depressing person who cries all the time even though her life is so fortunate? Obviously, whatever she believes, it doesn't work."And ...
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Christina Lovin: "Coal Country"
2007-11-12 11:41:00
I.What I can't remember, and what I can:my mother washing coal dust from the necksof Mason jars filled with last summer's jamsand vegetables, their lids and rings blackwith grit, contents obscured then visiblebeneath the touch of a damp flannel ragshe wiped across hand-printed labels,then dipped again into an enamel panwhere gray water settled from suds to silt.Those cloths were always discarded, neverused for dishes again, deemed unfitfor the kitchen. Fifty years are overnow: I've known sullied cloth and family:how some stains never wash out completely.II.Some stains never wash out completely,but my mother's mother, Mary, would scrubworn work camisas for the soiled but neatlyoiled and pompadoured Mexican railroad-tie men who came to coal country layingthe wooden ties two thousand to the mile.Boiled in lye, bleach in the wash and bluingin the rinse, the shirts emerged starkly whiteand innocent as angels. But these iron horsemenof the Apocalypse, bearing spikes and crossesfor coa...
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Jen Besemer: "The Sea of No Future"
2007-11-11 17:38:00
Writers of "transgressive" fiction now have an outlet at Ignavia, a new online journal seeking submissions of stories that are "dark, edgy and queer." (Maximum 4,000 words; submit by email only.) I found Jen Besemer's story from the first issue especially compelling. An excerpt: My mother is the sound of derisive laughter, my father is a gunshot. I am the crust of bread left on the table after the guests are gone, or perhaps?sometimes?I am the lost bicycle of autumn found at the bottom of spring?s ravine. In either case I am, how do you say it, flotsam or jetsam. That which is thrown overboard, that which is overbalanced, topheavy, that which is fallen.No. And again, no. I reject this present tense because I am no longer a shipwreck nor a wreck of any kind. No bruises darken my jaw, no scars slender as night glove my wrists or decorate my throat, and my long strand of bright freshwater pills has been buried for months. Oh, loss. That I could have pined for even these things, imagin...
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A Royal Priesthood
2007-11-10 18:41:00
Today is the feast day of Pope Leo the Great, bishop of Rome from 440 to 461 AD, whose writings played a significant role in clarifying the doctrine of the Incarnation. James Kiefer at The Daily Office shares this encouraging passage from one of his sermons: Although the universal Church of God is constituted of distinct orders of members, still, in spite of the many parts of its holy body, the Church subsists as an integral whole, just as the Apostle says: we are all one in Christ. . .For all, regenerated in Christ, are made kings by the sign of the cross; they are consecrated priests by the oil of the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the special service of our ministry as priests, all spiritual and mature Christians know that they are a royal race and are sharers in the office of the priesthood. For what is more king-like that to find yourself ruler over your body after having surrendered your soul to God? And what is more priestly than to promise the Lord a pure conscience and to...
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Makoto Fujimura on Jesus and Monsters
2007-11-09 16:28:00
Acclaimed visual artist Makoto Fujimura shares some profound insights about resisting the cultural imperative to choose between religious faith and the unfettered artistic imagination, in this article from Implications, the online journal of the Trinity Forum. Highlights: If you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the mainstream, as avant-garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. ?Grow up and do something useful for society!? The world seems to place them in opposition, pitting Innocence against the reality of the Experience. Artists are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness, and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the ?adult world,? a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation t...
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Getting Unstuck
2007-11-07 16:51:00
Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative hosts an online forum for contributors to weigh in on the question of the month. October's topic was the ever-timely (or ever-untimely, depending on how you look at it) problem of writer's block: How Do You Get Unstuck?  Some words of wisdom I found especially useful: Arlene L. Mandell: "Here?s a radical idea: Perhaps it?s all right to be stuck sometimes, not to be a busy little writing bee frantic for that next fuzzy morsel of pollen. Badly mixed metaphors like this one often come from the need to put something, anything, on the page."Harriet Gleeson: "The problem was possibly triggered when a respected mentor suggested that I could aim at a (first) chapbook using the theme Flight, the metaphor which has been winging its way into my work recently with no particular effort. The thought of publication was maybe too exciting -- I started to WORK towards the chapbook perhaps -- WORK the metaphor into my current piece, when what I need...

Recent Publications: Juked, Fulcrum and Others
2007-11-06 19:21:00
A roundup of my recent publications news: I just learned that I won an honorable mention in the 2007 Juked Fiction and Poetry Prize for my poems "Confession" and "The Opposite of Pittsburgh". (Partial credit for the latter poem goes to "Ada Porter", the character in my novel who actually wrote it. I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me.) In other news, my poem "Zeal" was accepted for the 2008 issue of FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, an exciting journal edited by my old Harvard classmate Philip Nikolayev and his wife Katia Kapovich. (But as George W. Bush said when he went to Yale, I got in solely based on merit.) Philip's latest book is Letters from Aldenderry. Another poem, "Delivered", will appear in the prose-poem issue of Poemeleon next month. I'll link to it here when the issue comes out. Finally, the University of Texas School of Law has made available online some poems I had published in the 2004 collection Off the Record...
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"Once Again" by "Conway"
2007-11-05 12:14:00
  "Conway", my pseudonymous correspondent at a maximum-security prison in central California, has gone another round in our poetry war with "Once Again", a response to my poem "A Difference of Opinion", which was itself inspired by Stephen Dobyns' "Artistic Matters" from his 1996 book Common Carnage. And the beat goes on...A Difference of Opinionby Jendi Reiter (1996)Once there was only the mudand one-celled things with just enough     purpo seinternal to themselves to be alive,but too soft to fossilize, leaving no traceof themselves in history except the evolved     patt ernfor whose sake billions of them were flung away     by naturelike soldiers or confetti.Finally the moment camewhen they began to prey upon one another,cell against cell, and only thendid nature sit back in satisfactionto watch the sharp beauty of spikes grow,the monumental callousness of armor,the cunning of hooks, all the h...

Book Notes: Couldn't Keep It to Myself
2007-11-05 10:44:00
Bestselling author Wally Lamb led me to some crucial insights about self-acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude with his novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True. Now, in his role as writing workshop leader at a women's prison, he's empowered some forgotten and outcast members of our society to understand how they became who they are, and to make the rest of us recognize our common humanity. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is the first collection of autobiographical essays by Lamb's students at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. The sequel, I'll Fly Away, was just released.Emotionally, this book is a hard read because of the numbing similarity of their traumatic pasts. The women's voices, however, are fresh and individual, even humorous at times. Childhood sexual abuse is virtually universal, and the pattern is often repeated in their adult relationships. Several of the authors finally struck back against men who were abusi...
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Secular Film and the Sublime
2007-11-03 11:49:00
Two films I saw this week have something to teach Christian artists about communicating the sublime. Neither was particularly deep, though one had pretensions in that direction. Both were about 40 minutes too long, the lack of character development eventually making me lose interest in pure visual sensation, but what a sensation it was. Most relationship-driven movies I've seen are directed like large-screen television shows, while the action movies are like video games, with lots of "shock and awe" but little attention to beauty. Across the Universe, the Beatles musical directed by Julie Taymor, is one of the few that sensually savors the visual medium and delights in exploring its extreme capabilities. So much so, in fact, that I was seduced by the experience of the film, and only afterward felt slightly dirty upon realizing what a work of propaganda it was. For one thing, drug use is shown in a wholly positive light. No one gets addicted, has a bad ...
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Signs of the Apocalypse: Divorce Expo
2007-10-29 12:14:00
An event held this past weekend in Austria suggests that none of life's milestones are safe from commercial exploitation. From BBC News: Austria is to host the world's first "divorce fair" this month, aimed at helping couples untie the knot as painlessly as possible. The event, taking place in Vienna, then Linz and Graz, will allow would-be divorcees to consult lawyers about their rights and seek advice. The divorce rate in Austria hit an all time high of 50% in 2006, with 66% of marriages in Vienna ending in divorce. The two-day fair is being held under the motto "New beginning".... Up to 20 exhibitors have registered so far, not only lawyers and mediators, but also estate agents, life-crisis experts, private detective firms and DNA laboratories offering paternity tests. One company will offer therapeutic package holidays for newly divorced people. There will also be a series of lectures on subjects like how divorce affects children and coping as a single parent. I say, why stop ...
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Drive-Thru Church
2007-10-24 18:03:00
  The ultimate in seeker-sensitive ministry! Hat tip to Church marketingsucks.com.
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