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Lance Larsen Interviewed at Meridian
2007-09-30 18:41:00
Award-winning poet Lance Larsen is the editor of Literature and Belief, the literary journal of Brigham Young University, where some of my poems have been privileged to appear. In this 2003 interview, he discusses writing and faith with Doug Talley at Meridian Magazine, a publication of Provo College in Utah. Highlights: MERIDIAN: Do you see yourself as tending toward melancholy, and if so, why?LARSEN: I don?t see myself as being melancholy, at least not unusually so. G.J. Nathan once said, ?Show me an optimist and, almost without exception, I?ll show you a bad poet.? Why? Because bad poets don?t usually wade into trouble; they don?t dive. If the scriptures and classic literature can be trusted, and I think they can, only trouble is of much interest. At heart I?m a romantic---but a romantic who believes that visions aren?t worth much if they aren?t tested by everyday living.****MERIDIAN: ...Do you, yourself, see the poems as largely autobiographical, or were you trying, instead, to ...

"The Approach" and Other New Poems by "Conway"
2007-09-27 18:48:00
My correspondent "Conway" has been very prolific this summer, writing poetry inspired by the books and printouts I've sent him: T.S. Eliot, Alexandre Dumas, Stephen Dobyns, and even yours truly. Conway is the pen name of a resident in a maximum-security prison in California, where he's serving 25-to-life for receiving stolen goods under the state's draconian three-strikes law. Here's a selection from his recent work:The ApproachThe Sky offers empty promisessmiling with toothy cloudsblades hiding in the invisible windpushing forward an orgasmic rainwide open mouth, stuttering-n-droolingover the gloriously ravaged landpolished and preened for the danceelectric frustration cracklinginstinctive thunder cacklingdestructively loud vibrations cussat all of mother nature's fussprimping for her approaching sunanother beautiful day begun...****PretenderSmell the dust circulatingrumble of gears, chattering windpushing past shadows of patience againpressed faces on clear glass, melted sand...
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"Grateful, Thankful" to Literal Latte
2007-09-25 12:47:00
The online journal Literal Latte has just posted their current issue, containing my story Grateful, Thankful, which won second prize in their 2006 fiction contest. This excerpt from my novel-in-progress finds Prue coping with the competing pressures of teenage sexuality and academic achievement. (Sex in bathrooms is becoming the King Charles's Head of this book; it just seems to find its way into whatever I am thinking.) Here's the opener: I could have avoided all that trouble if only I had remembered the capital of North Dakota. Normally I took schoolwork seriously, but it had been a late night at band practice and I decided to give myself a pass on memorizing stupid places I would never live. I couldn't see my mother moving us anywhere shotguns were more popular than cappuccino. I dropped my regulation #2 pencil and bent down to fetch it, so that on the upswing I could skim a peek at Ryan McFarrell's test paper. He winked at me, those blue eyes wide under s...
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Old and New Friends in Charlotte
2007-09-23 19:21:00
We had a wonderful trip to Char lotte , NC this past week, where I read my prizewinning story at the monthly meeting of the Charlotte Writers' Club. Many thanks to contest coordinator Annie Maier, president Richard Taylor (editor of the Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets), and other club officers for making me feel like a queen for a day. My tech-savvy but overworked husband made a video of the reading, which I will post here as soon as I can prevail upon him to extract it from the camcorder. The featured speaker at the meeting was poet and novelist Karon Luddy, another past winner of the CWC's short story contest, who read a touching and hilarious excerpt from her new book Spelldown. Set in a South Carolina mill town in 1969, this novel follows a quirky, brilliant adolescent girl who is determined to win a national spelling bee, while coping with her father's alcoholism. I am looking forward to reading my signed copy. Karon also read from her po...
More About: Site News , Friends , Book Reviews

Book Notes: Velvet Elvis
2007-09-23 19:19:00
Rob Bell, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, wrote a popular and controversial book two years ago called Velvet Elvis : Repainting the Christian Faith. The cutesy pop-culture title, like Bell's friendly conversational writing style, might lead you to dismiss it as a lightweight inspirational book to sell the gospel to Gen-X'ers. Don't make that mistake. Velvet Elvis may just be the emergent church's Mere Christianity. Taking his cue from N.T. Wright and other scholars of the "New Perspective on Paul", Bell wants to restore our sense of the Bible as a living narrative, an ever-evolving interpretive tradition in which we are called to participate, and he does this first of all by situating Jesus within his Jewish rabbinic heritage. Modernism has entrapped Christians into basing Biblical authority on a shared pretense that the text's meaning is objective and transparent -- as if we were saved by the correctness of our propositions, and...
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Ned Condini: "In the Farmer's Hut"
2007-09-23 17:11:00
(after Federico Garcia Lorca)When I feel lonelyyour ten years still remain with me,the three blind horses,your countless expressions and the littlefrozen fevers under maize leaves.At midnight cancer strode out into the hallsand spoke with the empty shells of      &nb sp;documents,live cancer full of clouds and thermometers,with its chaste desire of an appleto be pecked by nightingales.In the house where there's no cancerwhite walls break in the frenzy of      &nb sp;astronomyand in the smallest stables, in the crosses     &nbs p; of woods,for many years the fulgorof the burnings glows.My sorrow bled in the eveningswhen your eyes were two stones,when your hands were two townshipsand my body the whisper of grass.My agony was looking for its dress.It was dusty, bitten by bugs,and you followed it without tremblingto the threshold of dark water.Silly and handsomeamong the gentle creatures,with your mo...
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When Good Art Happens to Bad People
2007-09-17 18:51:00
Gregory Wolfe, editor of the award-winning literary journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, has a new blog that should be on the regular reading list of anyone interested in the intersection of the arts and religion. In his article In God's Image: Do Good People Make Good Art?, published in the magazine In Character and linked from his website, Wolfe ponders whether creativity could be considered a Christian virtue, and how this understanding of the creative process differs from the Romantic cult of genius, in which the personality of the artist becomes conflated with the work itself. As we all know, sublime art is often made by very flawed people, and vice versa. For some religious people, this would seem to undermine art's claim to be a spiritually significant activity. Unless aesthetics are strictly subordinated to moral concerns, artistic creativity could be a gateway to idolatry, worshipping the powers of the self unconnected to God or community. Wolfe suggests a less egocen...

Signs of the Apocalypse: Action Jesus
2007-09-12 18:00:00
It's almost too easy to make fun of Jesus kitsch, but if there were a Bulwer-Lytton Prize for the most delightfully awful representations of the J-Man, these statuettes at We Are Fishermen would win it. The hallmark of bad Jesus art is a belabored literalness that puts the big guy in situations that are anachronistic to the point of campiness. How will we know it's Jesus unless he's got the crown of thorns, the blissed-out smile and the white bathrobe? But dude...I know you have special healing powers, but you're going to get seriously banged up if you fall off the motorcycle wearing that outfit. This sacrilegious moment courtesy of MadPriest (who else?) who is looking for suggestions for items that would be banned from the Lambeth Conference gift shop. (The very existence of which is another Sign of the Apocalypse -- come on, guys, good taste is the only thing the Anglican Church has left!)   Update: MadPriest's equally mad commenters note that Ship of...
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Meet My Imaginary Friends in Charlotte, NC
2007-09-12 16:39:00
"The Albatross", a chapter from my novel-in-progress, has won the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Award for a Short Story from the Char lotte Writers' Club. The award ceremony, where I'll be reading my story and accepting a check for $500 that I've already spent, will be held on Sept. 18 at 7 PM at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 4345 Barclay Downs Drive, Southpark Mall, Charlotte, NC 28209. Come one, come all.Contest judge Meredith Hall, author of the memoir Without a Map, had these comments on "The Albatross": "The voice in this story is knockout wonderful. A child's voice is always very difficult to pull off. Often a child's voice is very sentimental, rosy, sweet, and we quickly become suspicious. More than that, the reader expects and needs greater wisdom and insight than a child possesses, but the writer must take care not to insert that adult sensibility into the child's perceptions. Here, Prue is so smart and so direct and so hungry to understand her world, we are led along by her, and...
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Poems for September 11
2007-09-11 21:45:00
Today is the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather than add my own words to a subject that is nearly beyond words, I share below a winning poem from the Winning Writers War Poetry Contest that I judge every year.SUMMER RAIN by Atar HadariThis is the season people die here,she said, Death comes for them now.Sometime between the end of winterand the rains, the rains of summer.And the funerals followed that summerlike social engagements, a ball, then another ballone by one, like debutantesuncles and cousins were presented to the great halland bowed and went up to tendertheir family credentials to the monarchwho smiled and opened the great doorsand threw their engraved invitations onto the iceand dancing they threw their grey cufflinksacross each others' shoulders, they crossed the floorand circles on circles of Horasfilled the sky silently with clouds, that chilled the flowers.And funeral trains got much shorte...
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In Memoriam: Madeleine L'Engle
2007-09-09 21:17:00
Madeleine L'Engle, the celebrated author of A Wrinkle in Time and many other books of fiction and Christian essays, passed away on Thursday at the age of 88. From the New York Times, Sept. 8: Madeleine L?Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children?s classic ?A Wrinkle in Time,? died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn. She was 88.Her death was announced yesterday by her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A spokeswoman said Ms. L?Engle (pronounced LENG-el) had died of natural causes at a nursing home, which she entered three years ago. Before then the author had maintained homes in Manhattan and Goshen, Conn. ?A Wrinkle in Time? was rejected by 26 publishers before editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux read it and enthusiastically accepted it. It proved to be her masterpiece, winning the John Newbery Medal as the best children?s book of 1963 and selling, so far, ei...
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Robert Bly Interviewed on PBS
2007-09-09 20:50:00
Last week the venerable poet Robe rt Bly was interviewed on Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS. Some highlights from their witty, uplifting conversation are below. I recommend watching the video online rather than simply reading the transcript, as Bly's joie de vivre is an essential part of the experience. BILL MOYERS: You know, when I first met you, you were just barely 50. And you read this little poem. You remember this one? ROBERT BLY: "I lived my life enjoying orbits. Which move out over the things of the world. I have wandered into space for hours, passing through dark fires. And I have gone to the deserts of the hottest places, to the landscape of zeroes. And I can't tell if this joy is from the body or the soul or a third place." Well, that's very good you find that because when you say, "What is the divine," it's much simpler to say there is the body, then there's the soul and then there's a third place. BILL MOYERS: Have you figured out what that third place is 30...

Resources for Postmodern Preaching
2007-09-07 21:27:00
Dr. David Teague, a former missionary who teaches at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts, has started the website Postmodern Preaching  as a resource for pastors and others who find the old methods of Christian apologetics irrelevant to a culture with postmodern ideas about truth and knowledge. The essays on this site are succinct and readable, providing a good starting place for the would-be evangelist. Here are some highlights from his article on Cultural Pluralism: In the postmodern world, all beliefs and belief systems are considered to be relative. We are told that there is no absolute truth. Faith is just a matter of private opinion. One person's faith is no more valid or unique than anyone else's. So, how do we preach in a world that is culturally pluralistic? We do so by being aware of: 1. The spirituality of postmodern people2. The uniqueness of Christianity 3. The need to be spiritually faithful yet also socially tolerant****... Cultural pluralism...suggests tha...
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Sponsor "Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights" at Soulforce
2007-09-07 20:53:00
Interfaith GLBT activist group Soulforce is coordinating a nationwide vigil for straight allies, called Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights . From the mission statement on their website: Seven Straight Nights will consist of a coordinated campaign of overnight vigils led by straight allies. It will sweep across capital cities throughout the nation during the week of October 7-13, 2007, gaining momentum in the national media as more states participate in the event.The vigil will be coordinated by a family, individual, or group (such as a church or student organization) who become the face of Seven Straight Nights in their state. Whether the State Leader is a single person or a group, the focus of the vigil, and the media coverage, will be the story of the State Leader's personal decision to speak out on behalf of LGBT equality. Depending on the state, the leaders will either offer thanks for the state's positive policy record or issue a call to action on pertinent issues such as ...
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Christian Wiman on the Blessings of Writer's Block
2007-09-06 20:51:00
This spring, Christian Wiman, the editor of the venerable Poetry magazine, published a controversial essay in The American Scholar, where he revealed his diagnosis with incurable blood cancer and how he had found his way back to both faith and writing after a period of darkness. Now, in an interview with Poets & Writers, Wiman shares updates on his condition (much improved, fortunately) and more wisdom about the spiritual side of writing. Highlights: P&W: How is the essay, which is very personal and intimate, different from confessional poetry, which has a bad reputation in some circles?CW: Among certain people, yes. With poetry about a very personal experience, for me, it usually gets transformed in some way by the form of the poem, just the demands of the art. I find that the essay is similar, actually?it requires a kind of discipline that removes you from the intensity of the experience, and helps to alleviate the intensity. I think it is possible to be much mor...
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Renee Ashley Interview: Thoughts on the Writing Process
2007-09-06 20:32:00
Wild River Review, a progressive e-zine of literature and politics, has an interview in their new issue with award-winning poet and fiction writer Renee Ashley , whose collection Salt won the 1991 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. The excerpts below particularly resonated with my own experience of the writing process, as well as my preferences as a poetry contest judge: WRR: Do all of your poems surprise you? RA: If they don?t, they get thrown away. The idea for me is to never settle for what I meant to say. And I seldom start out meaning to say anything. I wrote one poem trying to do something specific-from an idea. I wanted to recreate the rhythms of the gospel church I grew up in. Ma used to drive me there, drop me off, and I?d walk home. But that poem was a booger. The poem is fine. I stand by the poem. But the process was hell. I hope I never have another idea. Shoot me if I have an idea. I like it much better when I find out what the poem?s trying to say and then start aligning...
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"Art That Dares" to Comfort and Discomfort
2007-08-30 19:28:00
Images of Jesus are such common currency in our popular culture that we scarcely notice them, save to afford them a sentimental smile or an eye-roll of aesthetic disdain. From rappers in crucifixion poses on their album covers, to kitsch statues for your little softball player, Jesus is like Mrs. Dash, tossed in to spice up the processed images served up to our jaded palates.On the one hand, the Incarnation means that Jesus really is standing behind us in the batter's box (though he didn't help the Red Sox much this week). We mustn't get so churchy that we wall off certain areas of life as too mundane for his attention. He still knows when we're stealing from the cookie jar.On the other hand, casual handling of Jesus' image domesticates it, robbing it of its power, as least as often as Jesus-ification elevates the subject matter in question. For me, kitsch images of Jesus can clutter up my mind and block my ability to visualize him as a r...
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Poem: "Gratitude"
2007-08-30 11:36:00
In green dusk the rowboat, cradledon lapping waves, floats unmannedlike the largest among fallen leaves.The wind leans on the pier, wood answersits old spouse, not needing half the wordsto understand the familiar reply.And still the scrub grass grips, leans into      & nbsp;each slapof water and reclines gleaming.Every leaf silver in the last lightwaving, though there are no more      & nbsp;departures.The trees are changing, cell by cell,so slowly that they seem to be waitingfor something that is already present. Flung by a scarf of breeze, a bird's foghorn     &nbs p; hootspreads its echo over the lake, telling     &nbs p; of distance,dares ropes to snap and oars to sliceinto the eely dark.But I, having learned of gratitudeso late, my best gift was turningto leave the grass untrodden, the boat empty.       ;published in the 2007 Voices Is...
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Psalm 91: Because I Said So
2007-08-26 19:00:00
I've always had trouble believing the more concrete promises of God: peace, food, shelter, protection, health. Spiritual ones are easier to fudge. I can't see whether God has answered someone else's prayers for discernment, peace of mind, comfort, or other invisible interior states. But I look around at the world where so many people are not peaceful, healthy, or materially secure, at least some of whom presumably are praying to God and are no less worthy than others (like myself) who have these blessings. Faithful people acting as God's hands in the world can remedy some of these inequities, but not all. So what do we do about the many Old Testament passages where God seems to be promising something He hasn't delivered?I was reciting Psalm 91 the other night as part of the Compline (evening) service in the Book of Common Prayer: 1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say [b] of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fo...
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Christian Books Resource, and Some Thoughts on Pascal's Wager
2007-08-22 18:13:00
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan maintains the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, an extensive collection of theological classics that can be read online for free. Whether you're looking for a pithy quote from Saint Athanasius for your blog, or an alternative to computer solitaire during those low-energy afternoons in your cubicle, CCEL is the place for you.I came across this resource via James Kiefer's thumbnail biography of Blaise Pascal at The Daily Office yesterday, which is worth quoting below for its elucidation of an often-oversimplified argument: Pascal's WagerOne argument used by Pascal has been much ridiculed and (in my judgement) much misunderstood. It has come to be called Pascal's Wager, and may be stated thus: "If Christianity is true, then you stand to gain infinitely by accepting it. If it is false, then you stand to lose only a finite amount of well-being by accepting it. Therefore the odds make deciding to become a Christian the sensibl...
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John Koessler on Holy Emptiness
2007-08-21 13:25:00
John Koessler, chair of pastoral studies at Moody Bible Institute, wrote an incredibly moving essay in Christianity Today about how emptiness is the precondition for blessing. Once again Jesus reverses our worldly values, such that the depth of our neediness becomes the measure of God's opportunity to fill us with good gifts. Some excerpts follow: My mother was hungry most of her life. She cooked daily for us, but rarely sat down to eat. Unable to stomach the food she'd prepared for the rest of us, she ate her own meals at odd hours, nourishing herself on a strange combination of the ordinary and the exotic. One day she might eat a baked bean sandwich smothered in ketchup; the next, broiled lobster.Mother blamed her eating habits on a childhood of poverty. Born six years before the Great Depression, her earliest memories were of hunger. Her family was so poor they often went days without eating. When there was food, it was never enough. Sometimes all they had to share between them...
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Judith & Gershon Goldhaber: "Noah and the Flood" (excerpt)
2007-08-21 13:00:00
Award-winning poet Judith Goldhaber and her husband, the artist and physicist Gerson Goldhaber, have just released a sequel to their well-received collaboration, the illustrated poetry book Sonnets from Aesop. Their new collection, Sarah Laughed: Sonnets from Genesis, embellishes familiar Bible stories with humorous and mystical elements from midrash and folklore. Willis Barnstone writes, "Sarah Laughed is utterly charming, poem and icon...In the best tradition of imitation it illumines the Abrahamic religions." The Goldhabers have kindly permitted me to reproduce the following excerpt from their "Noah and the Flood " sonnet sequence:ii. The Time is ComingGod spoke to Noah when he became a manand said, "The time is coming ? build an Ark;storm clouds are gathering; soon you will embarkupon the seas, as outlined in My plan.Make the Ark as sturdy as you can ?line it with pitch, strip gopher trees of barkto shape the hull, and lest it be too darkcut windows, and a doorway." Noah beganto ...

Church of the Holy Cow
2007-08-20 15:15:00
The artist Steve Emery, who blogs over at Color Sweet Tooth, put up a thoughtful post some months ago about taking some time away from the noise, conflict and complications of the church in order to reconnect with God. Commenting on the impending Episcopal schism, he wrote in March: Why do we leave a church? Because we no longer consider the worship of the others to be true? Because we fear our own faith or the faith of our children may be damaged by hearing what we consider to be wrong ideas? Because we no longer believe the Spirit moves in the presider, and the Eucharist is thus somehow invalidated?For now I find these questions beyond me, and not mine to answer. This may change.In my case I did not leave a church in particular, though it was events in a particular church that precipitated my departure. I left organized church in general. I needed to leave, like a man who needs to clear his head at a concert or a party by going outside and breathing some cold fresh air. I was seei...
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"Talent", Fatalism, and the Artist's Fears
2007-08-18 16:28:00
One of my favorite "books for writers" is Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Whether you need to sustain your faith in a long-term project or gather the courage to leap into a new one, this little book is an invaluable aid to identifying and overcoming the fear-based myths that prevent you from doing your work. One of those is "talent": Tale nt , in common parlance, is "what comes easily". So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn't come easily, and -- Aha!, it's just as you feared!Wrong. By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have -- and probably no worry more common. This is true even among artists of considerable accomplishment.Talent, if it is anything, is a gift, and nothing of the artist's own making....Were talent a prerequisite, then the better the artwork, the easier it would have been to make. But...
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Divine Impassibility? A Jewish Perspective
2007-08-17 16:35:00
No, not impossibility. For the non-theology-geeks among you, impassibility is the doctrine that God does not suffer or have emotions in the human sense. This assertion is disputed among Christians, and seems to appeal more to Calvinists and others who are anxious to preserve God's absolute sovereignty. (If that sounds absurdly presumptuous, well, I phrased it that way for a reason.) I lean toward believing that it's an unbiblical notion that crept in from Hellenistic culture, which understood perfection as changelessness. By contrast, the Bible tells us that God is faithful and eternal, but this need not mean that God is unaffected by events. Rather, it means that God's loving nature and His promises are completely reliable. Writing in this week's Jewish World Review, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo connects the de-personalization of God to a loss of moral significance for human emotions and actions: ...[T]he term G-d...often stands for completely o...
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"Pocket Full of Violet" and Other New Poems by "Conway"
2007-08-16 11:42:00
  My prison pen pal "Conway" continues to make great strides in his poetry and artwork. As I mentioned in last month's post, conditions have improved at his new location, where he has a job in the library and access to colored pencils and a typewriter. I hope to reproduce some of his drawings here soon. He often picks up themes from the classics he has been reading and reworks them in a voice that's all his own. He sent me these poems after reading T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". I heard some echoes of Eliot's closing section ("What the thunder said") in the first poem below.In his July 17 letter, Conway writes, "...The other day while going through work change (strip search) the lady (if you wanna call her that!) searched my lunch (state issue baloney, apple, bread & mustard) well I had put a scooter pie inside the bag, I had purchased from canteen -- she said I was not allowed to have it, who knows what (security risk) this would present, 'the great marshmallow p...
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Partners in Health: 20th Anniversary Appeal
2007-08-14 21:43:00
For 20 years, Partners in Heal th  has provided free medical services to the poorest communities around the world, while lobbying developed nations for more equitable access to medication and technology. Their website states, "Our mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care." Millions of people are dying of treatable, preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS and TB because medications are unaffordable or countries lack the infrastructure for traditional means of foreign-aid delivery to be effective. PIH's innovative "community-based care" shows dramatic results where other programs have failed. Their aid workers make a hands-on, intensive personal commitment to their patients, helping them adhere to treatment regimens and addressing other non-medical problems that interfere with their care. For PIH, fighting disease in poor communities involves larger issues of social justice, including access to education, clean w...
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Christian Mood Swings
2007-08-13 16:31:00
When I became a novelist last year, I decided to start having emotions. Bad idea. My characters experience higher highs and lower lows than I've generally allowed myself in "real life". I thought that because it wasn't "really happening to me" I could enjoy the upside without the downside. Wrong again. Something that happened around the same time was that God answered my prayer (chuckling in His size-40 sleeve all the while) to remove my fear of being incinerated by contact with Him. Nowadays, when I read "Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" (Jeremiah 23:29), my response is more "Awesome, dude!" than "Yikes - where do I hide?"Since I opened the doors of my creativity and my prayer life to let the storms sweep through, amazing things have happened. My writing has taken on new degrees of honesty, depth and mission, and my zeal to know God has increased. BUT...a lot of the time I feel like the Holy Spirit's ch...
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Inmates' Access to Religious Books Threatened
2007-08-13 13:09:00
From the government that brought you Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo...Not content with violating the Eighth Amendment, our prison system is taking aim at freedom of religion, too. Chabad.org reports on new federal regulations that would remove thousands of religious books from prison libraries: From behind bars, many prisoners turn to religion to fill the void in their lives. Frequently, prisoners' pursuits dovetail with the prison system's goal of rehabilitating the convicts in its care; at the end of their incarcerations, if prisoners leave with a better understanding of right and wrong, so the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to return in the future.But that logic has come under fire recently by a federal rule change implemented in May limiting prison libraries under the domain of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from carrying no more than 150 titles dealing with any single religion.The new policy, while rooted in a desire to prevent religiously-motivated militancy from taking hold ...
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Suffering for the Wrong Reasons
2007-08-07 22:56:00
The Christian life is not an easy one...but then, what life is? "Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal," wrote Longfellow in "A Psalm of Life". Prophets and preachers can be stung to harshness at the thought of people wasting that one precious life on trivia, when they could be growing in the knowledge and love of God. But I also see a lot of Grape-Nuts religion; woe to you who prefer Frosted Flakes to a bowl of unsweetened gravel, because you are still selfish enough to want God to make you happy. That is not the God I am encountering in the Gospels and the Psalms. God is always making promises to people, very concrete ones involving food, shelter, the birth of children, and livestock, as well as the ones we can reframe as acceptably "spiritual", like justice and salvation. "I came that they might have life, and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10)The issue of homosexuality puts this kind of "No pain, no gain" religiosity on di...
More About: Bible , Reasons , Suffering , Wrong , Erin