Grief & Delight

This past weekend my friend Heidi Johnston and I led a session at the Rabbit Room’s Hutchmoot UK in Oxford, England. Our topic was delight and the writer.

Don’t Waste Your Experience

In the forums of The Habit Membership, Carey Christian recently posted an essay she had written about her experience as a survivor of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. She survived by hiding with classmates in a locked and darkened office for three hours. (You can read the whole essay here.)

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.

Looking the World Back to Grace

If you’ve read Anne of Green Gables, you probably remember that scene near the beginning when Matthew Cuthbert is driving Anne Shirley from the train station to Green Gables for the first time. Anne chatters away almost without a pause, and Matthew listens, replying only when asked a direct question, and then only briefly.

New Online Course: Writing with Jeeves & Wooster

For this installment of the “Writing with…” series, we will do some light summer reading. P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves is widely considered to be the best and most representative of his Jeeves and Wooster books. Our narrator is the lovably dunderheaded, overprivileged, never-employed Bertie Wooster. His good-hearted but bumbling attempts to solve his friends’ and relatives’ problems (not to mention his own) always make matters worse, until his exceedingly capable valet Jeeves wades in and puts everything to rights.

Old Favorites: Arthur Alligood’s One Silver Needle

[Editor’s note: This piece is the second in a series begun by Mark Geil called “Old Favorites,” where various contributors to the blog reflect on some of the most beloved, well-worn albums in their collections. Today, we hear from Jonathan Rogers about Arthur Alligood’s album, One Silver Needle.]

A Habit of Friendship

[Editor’s note: This post first appeared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit newsletter. To learn more and sign up, click the link at the end.]

I call this letter (and my podcast, and my membership site) The Habit because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits.” To continue quoting Milledgeville’s favorite daughter…

Release Day Review: Hidden in Shadow by Janna Barber

Every month the moon grows to fullness, wanes to nothing, then grows back toward fullness again. That’s how it looks from here, anyway. In fact, the moon is just the moon, always there and always the same size, however it appears to us.

Cunning and Prudence: Some Thoughts on Persuasion

Through language we are able to create realities. We do it every day. Persuading, encouraging, fear-mongering, story-telling, teaching, selling, insulting, begging—these are just a small sampling of the ways we create and/or rearrange inward realities in other people.

It’s Not Your Job to Be a Genius

The first TED talk I remember ever watching was “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, in 2009. If you aren’t among the 19 million people (literally) who have watched this talk, or if you just want to relive the magic, here’s the link. There’s a lot of good stuff in that talk, but the thing that has most stuck with me these eleven years is Gilbert’s account of the way the word “genius” has changed through the centuries.

Realism of Presentation, Realism of Content

In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis puts a finger on one of the things I love so much about Tolkien, though Lewis is not specifically talking about his good friend Tolkien’s stories. In the chapter “On Realisms,” Lewis distinguishes between what he calls “realism of presentation” and “realism of content.” Realism of presentation refers to those little concrete details that give the world of a story the textures that make it feel like the world God made. Realism of presentation, writes Lewis, “is the art of bringing something close to us, making it palpable and vivid, by sharply observed or sharply imagined detail.”

Love and Assent

While reading Wendell Berry’s story collection, That Distant Land, I was struck by this description of a character named Martha Elizabeth Coulter:

She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seems, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever or whomever she looked at.

—Wendell Berry, That Distant Land

I don’t know whether Wendell Berry is a student of Thomas Aquinas, but that description of Martha Elizabeth as a person who “assented wholly to the being” of the people and things around her sounds like the kind of thing Aquinas would say.