We got to the place and stared at it. I looked down at the plaque, and it said: “Construction (Crucifixion).” Ah-ha. "Leo," I said, trying to sound natural and not too teacherly, "this is a picture of where Jesus died on the cross." He reached his arms up for me to hold him, wanting to be close to me, and also higher up to see. Once near, he pointed matter-of-factly at the circle and said, "Ok, mama. Then is that the stone that was rolled away?"
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‘Hamlet’ as Lenten Fare
It has been a hard winter in lots of ways, and my spiritual life is not immune to the toll the virus took. That said, one upside of the interruption is that I have made an unlikely substitution for what would have been conventional devotional reading in a more typical year: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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Concerning Humility
When I was eight, I saw the photo of Muhammad Ali delivering the knockout to Sonny Liston. I was awestruck. The next Saturday, when I was lucky enough to win my little league wrestling match, I tried to replicate Ali’s pose. My parents called me up to the bleachers and I received an early lesson in humility.
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How Karl Marx Saved My Christmas
I was combing through Barbies, Lego sets, and the latest versions of Monopoly in search of something to give my two-year old for Christmas. Nothing particularly excited me, and there was nothing I could think of that he actually needed. My limited parenting experience told me he would get more entertainment out of the box and wrapping paper than the actual item anyway. But it seemed bad form simply not to buy my child a Christmas gift. So there I stood.
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Backward Miracle
Every once in a while, we need prose, not poetry, says the poet. We need just the vessel with the wine and nothing more. We need a single loaf and the single fish and that is all.
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Not Many Wise, Not Many Noble
Inside the ‘museum’ was a pile of artifacts — four-hundred-year-old Bibles, sacred heart pictures, a reproduction of the shroud of Turin, old motorcycles, more dinosaurs, and a neon sign that read: “Jesus Saves.”
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Everydayness & the Restless Heart
Education, fundamentally, is about human flourishing, and in order for an education to succeed in engendering flourishing, it is necessary for it to reach the heart. It’s not enough to have a perfect grasp on Augustine, or to write a flawless essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. When I discover that the questions Augustine asks are my questions, or that Atticus Finch and I have something fundamental in common, human flourishing starts to happen.
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Loving Your Neighbor: Liturgies in Pandemia
We are not “brains on a stick” but we instinctively seek out rituals that shape our loves – for better or for worse. At our worst, we gang up on each other and cut each other down. At our best, we give our lives for one another. It all depends on what liturgies we've been practicing.
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A Paper Thin Distance (Conversation)
On February 16th of this year, Daryl Davis, an African American blues musician who engages with members of the Ku Klux Klan, sat down with Christian Picciolini, the former leader of a white-supremacist skinhead group, for a conversation at the New York Encounter. Their gripping discussion offers profound insight and ultimately hope for this moment in our nation.
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The Moon and Me
As I searched my memory further, I smiled when I realized that this was just the kind of magic, just the kind of alchemy, which the moon has been working in my life for as long as I can remember.
