The Rabbit Room

Hutchmoot Podcast & Video: The Trees at the Heart of Creation

The Hutchmoot Podcast features some of our favorite sessions recorded at our annual conference which celebrates art, music, story, and faith in all their many intersections. Today, we’re excited to share a session led by Andrew Peterson and Tim Mackie (of the Bible Project) called “The Trees at the Heart of Creation” from 2021’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form.

Good Bad Art and Bad Bad Art

In college I had a housemate who was a DJ at a Christian radio station. He believed (and freely admitted) that the music he played at the radio station was mostly a watered down imitation of the pop and rock music that was his first love. He viewed it as an act of spiritual sacrifice to give up “secular” music for “Christian” music that he considered artistically inferior. At the time I didn’t know what to think of this pious sentiment. I have since decided that this kind of thinking is a threat to civilization.

Imagination as an Agent of Healing (Part 1 of 3)

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives… Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.

—Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Encanto and the Miracle of Empathy

One of the reasons I love fantasy as a genre is because of the inclusion of magic. In fantasy stories—the good ones anyway—magic can reveal the spiritual realities that we all sense in life but can’t see, and have no material frame to express.

The Habit Podcast: Amy Baik Lee Notices Small Splendors

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers interviews memoirist and essayist Amy Baik Lee. Amy writes essays and short memoirs for The Cultivating Project and on her own blog, A Homeward Life. She is also the co-director of the Arts Guild of The Anselm Society.

On Poetry, Programming, Chaos, and Cosmos

A few years ago at Hutchmoot, Pete Peterson said something that has been enriching the leaf-mould of my mind ever since. Quoting Walt Wangerin, Jr., Pete talked about how the Sanskrit word cinoti “makes of the poet ‘a heaper into heaps, and a piler into piles.’”

Stuff We Liked in 2021

No matter what your 2021 held, you were no doubt helped along by some comforting art, music, and story. You might have discovered an album that seemed to name precisely your own emotional landscape; perhaps you stumbled on a book that you could count on as an escape in the silent hours of the night; or maybe it was a TV show that kept you hooked from its pilot to its finale. Whatever it was, we want to hear about it! So please share in the comments section below. In the meantime, we’ve got some excellent recommendations from the Rabbit Room’s staff and blog contributors to get the conversation started.

The Light that Shines in Darkness

It was the 26^th of December, the second day of Christmas by the traditional reckoning, and I’d spent the balance of it on the couch, nursing the cold I’d sustained thanks to late nights and early mornings and running out barefoot onto the frost-touched grass for just one more branch of holly. But I couldn’t have been happier—behind me, a glad and golden Christmas Day crowned with laughter and the faces of those I love; before, a long week of indolence punctuated by last-minute gatherings with friends and small flurries of merrymaking.