Hutchmoot Headed Your Way

For the past 10 years, Hutchmoot has been an opportunity for like-minded people from far and wide to gather in Nashville and celebrate art, music, story, and faith. But as we all know, this year has been full of surprises.

“A White Man’s Lament for the Death of God’s Beloved”

We’re grateful to share this new song from Andrew Peterson today, and grateful he wrote it. Link to the video and full lyrics are included in this post.

Intervening Light: An Interview with Stephen Crotts

Whether you know his name yet or not, chances are that Stephen Crotts is responsible for at least one piece of art—whether it’s an album cover, book cover, poster, or stand-alone work—that has stopped you in your tracks and filled you with wonder. The latest piece of magic Stephen has contributed to Rabbit Room Press is the cover and inside illustrations of The Door on Half-Bald Hill.

Whilst the Cities Sleep: Quarantine Quatrains

It’s funny how forgotten, yet familiar books suddenly suggest themselves in lockdown! I have been re-reading a lovely old copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, in Edward Fitzgerald’s famous verse translation, and taking comfort, pleasure and fresh insight from it in this isolation. I’ve also been re-entranced by its elegant form. Fitzgerald cast his translation into a series of little quatrains: four line stanzas, each chiming sonorously on a single rhyming sound. They start with a couplet, and then he allows himself a free unrhymed line to gather energy and momentum before ringing the quatrain to a close as the final line returns to the first rhyme sound with renewed emphasis, and satisfying finality.

Our 2020 Summer Reading List

The constant din of voices swirling and opinions flying in today’s physically-distanced, yet socially-shrinking world is overwhelming. Searching for trusted information from diverse points of view is daunting. Like many of you, we at the Rabbit Room are processing current events, both as an organization and personally, and are seeking to listen and act with empathy, peace, and grace in Christ.

The Habit Podcast: Jericho Brown (feat. Matt Conner)

Jonathan Rogers loved Matt Conner’s interview with Jericho Brown so much that he wants you to hear it, too. Jericho Brown won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Tradition and is one of America’s great literary geniuses.

Gardening 101: Fighting Racism in Practice

We moved house in 2019, just at the springing of spring. There was untold renovation work to be done, but we managed to get a small garden into the ground. There were enough tomatoes and cucumbers to put back, although to my shame, I over-salted my bread-and-butter pickles to the point of inedibility. This year, though, was to be the year. My in-laws gifted us their old tiller, and my wife and I laid out ideas for the plot: six hundred square feet, well situated in the best sun, while leaving the kids plenty of yard to play in. We would array appropriate companion plants and multifarious heirloom varietals. We would work in herbs and well-timed cold-hardy vegetables in a potager able to withstand the soggy, chill winter. Yet, it was not to be so.

Spirit & Sound, Part 2: The Breath Between Us

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 1: The Sound Breath Makes.]

I have spent the past few months thinking about what it means to say the Holy Spirit is the Breath of God. (For more about this, you may want to have a look at the first post in this series.) I’ve been writing about this theme in connection with the arts, not current events. But the Spirit (as Jesus says) blows where it pleases, and it’s seemed almost impossible to think about breath without also thinking about the conversations going on all around me.

The Second Muse: The Lost Art of Listening (Epilogue)

In this last episode of Season Two, Drew Miller asks three questions of the Rabbit Room staff: How did you listen to music growing up and how have your listening habits changed? What is your advice for becoming a better listener? And who are some artists you’re listening to right now?

The Habit Podcast: Amy Alznauer

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Amy Alznauer, author of The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity and The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, professor of calculus and number theory at Northwestern University, and writer in residence at St. Gregory the Great, a Catholic church in Chicago.

The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor just released yesterday, June 16th.

The Resistance, Episode 20: John Mark McMillan

How can you give away what you’ve lost?

Why Beowulf May Yet Help Us

In our age of fresh harrowing, of renewed raid, and lamented loss, Beowulf may yet come to our aid. The power and elegiac majesty of this most renowned of Old English poems has ensured its continued cultural significance, though the mead halls are long derelict, the days of hoard and heraldry long past. As a piece of literature, Beowulf provides a stark reminder of the ominous possibilities of a sin-wracked world, the need that remains for the heroic and altruistic, and the virtue of courage in the face of seemingly unassailable evil.