Review: Zach and Maggie’s The Elephant in the Room

An album that opens with a polka imagining what might happen if the “elephant in the room” is literally an elephant in a room and closes with an emotional journey through family life that plays a bit like the flashback scene in “Up,” punctuated by Paganini, indicates the extraordinary range of Nashville duo Zach and Maggie. 

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.

Rabbit Room Recs: Our Favorite Reads of 2022

Welcome to Favorites Week here at the Rabbit Room. For the next few days, we will be detailing some of our favorite finds of the last calendar year in the form of Recommended Reading, Recommended Listening, and Recommended Viewing.

Finding the Right Words: A Review of Little Prayers for Ordinary Days

As a child, I was terrified of being asked to pray aloud. It always seemed like other people—usually adults—knew all the right words and how to string them together. And even if I thought my everyday words were good enough, there was the problem of focusing so hard on finding those words that I was no longer praying with my heart, only my mouth. If you assume this is something I just grew out of, you’d only be partially right.

The Table is a Temple: A Review of Taste and See

“Why do we eat—together?” This is the central question of Andrew Brumme’s exquisite new docuseries, Taste and See, a cinematic journey into the essential sacredness of food. As the pilot so winsomely insists, there is much more to eating than meets the eye: from cultivation to preparation, to serving and sharing, food is a vehicle for holy mystery and transformative grace. If this sounds like a recipe for lofty theological discourse, it’s not.

Lessons in Longing: A Review of Blue Flower by The Gray Havens

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis writes of the distant Castlereagh Hills outside his nursery windows. “They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing-Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.”

Joy on the Journey: Chasing Sehnsucht in Zhao’s Nomadland

“Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?”

In the opening minutes of Chloe Zhao’s film Nomadland, we see these words inked on the arm of an Amazon employee named Angela, who is showing off tattoos to her new friend, Fern. It’s a quick scene that may not seem particularly noteworthy, however, nothing in this movie is extraneous or insignificant. The words of this tattoo present us with both a portent of what’s to come and the central tension of the entire film.

Faith & Contingency in J Lind’s The Land of Canaan

I heard it said once in an interview with Michael Pollan that, when it comes down to it, every writer only really asks one question with their entire career. I can’t decide whether I agree with that assessment. As with all aphorisms, part of me straightens up in my chair with that feeling of eureka! It really is that simple! while another part of me sits back, scratches my chin, and bitterly mutters, That is entirely reductive and unfair to all writers. But, for the purposes of this review, I’ve managed to persuade my skeptical half that this observation is valid, because as I listen to J Lind’s songs, I find that they all ask one existentially rattling question: Where and how are we to find meaning given our inescapable condition of contingency?

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.

True Testimony: What Makes It Through by Sara Groves

As I listened to Sara Groves’s new album on repeat, my mind grasped for the best way to describe what makes her songwriting so special. And as I grasped away, a moment from one of my favorite movies kept stubbornly arising in my head. It’s a scene from towards the end of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a special moment of understanding that unfolds between the story’s eponymous protagonist and his elusive, enigmatic idol, Sean O’Connell.

In the Song A Love That Sees You: A Review of Becca Jordan’s Becoming Ordinary

The other night in bed, I told my husband, “I’m sad.” That’s not a statement I allow myself to say out loud very often, and never without being prompted first; but something about that dark space felt safe, so I risked it.

A Review of Taylor Leonhardt’s Hold Still

I think my wife, Kelsey, said it best: “Find me in twenty years and I will still be listening to this warm, rich album.” Everything about Hold Still is a slow burn—even down to the process of making it, from what I’ve gathered. Begun before the pandemic and finished just a few months ago, Taylor Leonhardt sure had to hold still in order to make it. But the result of her patience is an abiding work which is sure to stand the test of time.