Giving Up the Freeze
How I found my cynicism and why I'm losing it for Lent
Nick Richtsmeier
Creed and Crawdads | Race and Empire
I don’t set out each year with a reading “Focus.” For one, I’m terrible at focus. For two, I need freedom throughout the year to ebb and flow, to follow attractions to unexpected genres or titles. But when I see a year in books in reverse, I find
Nostalgia's Curse and the Art of Letting Go
Awards Season Media Roundup
A Warning: This is all vaguely spoiler-y.
I've been working on a summary of 2019 media—multitudinous as it was—for almost a month. For the past 10 years having small kids and a job with lots of travel sent me far afield from
A Place for Us
Discussing Disgust, the Problem of Roots, and Why We Keep Pushing Each Other Away
The Short Version:
Though we work hard to ignore it, we live in a constant state of Threat Alert. Our radars highly attuned to stuff that doesn’t belong or places where we feel unwelcome. The
The Wild Goat: Intro
In Mark 5, the Gospel tells a strange story, often glossed over by sermons. A demon-possessed man, living among tombs and showing signs of self-mutilation is liberated by Jesus. Cast out by his family and neighbors to live in the wild, the story rings of the Jewish rite of the
Wisdom and Light for All
A Poetic Restating of the First Chapter of the Gospel According to John
In the beginning was WISDOM:
WISDOM was alongside God and WISDOM was God.
The One was alongside God in the beginning.
ALL came into being because of The One,
and NONE came into being independently.
In The
Grace for the Demolition
“I’ve gone to church all my life, but so much of it doesn’t feel right anymore.”
I drove west on the once rural road that stretches across the frontage of my home. The threat of progress had been brewing for a while, this time in the form of
Lent is a Rebellion
I didn’t know what Lent was until I was an adult. It just wasn’t a part of our tradition.
For nearly 20 years the concepts of Mass, liturgy and Ash Wednesday were as foreign to me as a Muslim call to prayer, and just as frightening. Everyone I
Dear Church, Start Here:
As best as I’ve tried to shake it these (nearly) forty years, church is in my blood. I grew up in a every-Wednesday-night-and-twice-on-Sunday kinda family. My dad was deacon for many years and my mom helped wherever her gender was allowed, which in those days was usually cooking and
God, We Need a Silent Night
“There’s one thing I hate, all the noise, noise, noise, noise.”
— The Grinch
Christmas is noisy. Noisy with sounds for sure, the honking and hum of a mall parking lot, the rock concert version of Joy to the World, the overstuffed rooms will so much talking and so little