Clearing the Path: A Review of On the Spiritual Disciplines

After production for All the Wrecked Light wrapped up in the spring, I took an excurses of sorts from writing projects of my own to take on graduate studies in Biblical languages. I’ve spent enough time in Koine Greek already that moving through the New Testament feels familiar, though I still certainly have a distance to go. But Hebrew is an entirely different matter.

Collaboration & Community in All the Wrecked Light

A language scholar told me this summer that, in the Hebrew culture, the imagined direction of man in time was reversed. While we in the modern western world see ourselves as moving forward in time, facing the future with the past behind us, the ancient Hebrew mind saw the opposite.

Lent, Week 5: The Thick Darkness Where God Was

Like any production, we start with Act I.

I’ve thought about Moses a lot in the last year—bent and grey, hunched over some cut of stretched goat skin or the last bit of papyrus he’d been carrying around since the day he headed out from Egypt.

Name Him Yeshua

What do we need from a New Year’s post? What do we say?

Strength: According to Fathers, Forests & North Stars

It was all right, I knew, and so I drew lots of pictures of it. Grandma wasn’t sick anymore; Grandma was with Jesus, somewhere in the sweet by and by. I was going to wear a navy velvet dress and black leather shoes and sing “Amazing Grace” with my brother at her funeral. I was only five years old, but I was a pious little child and firmly believed someday I would go see Jesus and her together. The three of us would be very happy, and that was a moment worth drawing pictures of, so I drew lots of pictures of it. Of course it was all right. I drew pictures of it.

All Your Silver: To My Grandmother

When I was in high school, I carved out a piece of my humanities education to study stained glass windows, old cathedrals of European kingdoms, and the men who made them fine—medieval artists smelling strong of a long day’s labor, Middle Age wet mortar, and musty, dark communion wine. These men made beauty meant to age, with secret dyes that centuries of chemists in white lab coats have not yet learned to redesign that grow bolder and brighter year after year of sun and dust and time—years longer than any artist can survive. The moment those windows were made was the moment they were most decayed, and that is all the artist ever saw, and every generation watched the colors slowly come alive.

The Homesick Heart: A Review of A Place I Knew Before

There’s nothing like viewing the world through the lens of another language to show you how limited your own can be. We can’t ever fully merge two lexical frameworks into one, and our translations often fall short of the original concept. Some vocabularies don’t concisely reach into others.

If A Tree Falls in the Forest

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Book Review: Inexpressible by Michael Card

Folks around the Rabbit Room find a lot of joy in discovering foreign words that express ideas our English dictionaries have no entry for.