The Rabbit Room

This convinced me to watch The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (as a starting point, I mean, clearly there are a lot of other things I still need to watch). I’ve seen all but the last vignette now. Not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. I can see why some people have mentioned Flannery O’Connor in trying to describe it.
“Pan shot!” “Pan shot!”

That’s a wonderful interview, thanks to BOTH heartbreakingly-brilliant writers. It goes a long way to showing why we all politely ignore the alligator thing: Jonathan is just giving so much of himself to the writing community. (Peter Bannister, though…I’ll have to pray through that one.)
I would encourage anyone to come join us at the stately…[Read more]

@Helena
Well, the Sorensen taste in books hasn’t steered me wrong so far, so I’ll probably give it a try…eventually. I still haven’t gotten to the Queen’s Thief series, to my shame, and that has to take priority.

Helena! Did you just resolve the tension between Determinism and Free Will?

I love how mythic this is. If a thousand years ago there was an ancient tribe forgotten in the vastness of the steppe, or on a tiny windswept island, and that tribe had an old medicine-woman who after a long life of canny discernment and honest searching out of the ways…[Read more]

I’ve resisted any temptation to blog up till now, but I wasn’t sure of pasting something too long directly into the comments section. So, here’s this. It may be a one-shot, or maybe I’ll find something to add to it.
https://musingsonthemoot.wordpress.com/
To all of you that I got to meet or renew friendships with this year, the time I got to…[Read more]

I didn’t expect to love this post when I opened it, but boy, did I. I didn’t know the meaning of “theodicy” either – if I encountered it in the wild it was one of those things that wasn’t worth looking up. So I thought: now I see it’s just that thing that has gripped my imagination too, and occupied more and more of my mind the last several years.…[Read more]

@jonathanrogers I admit, I mostly found music from radio stations and marketing machinery too. But that was before the Rabbit Room as well as social media. In the last year (since about Hutchmoot I guess) I’ve become more involved in the RR than previously, and I’ve discovered – and purchased – more new music in that year than in the ten before…[Read more]

Excellent – this needs to be talked about so much more than it has been. People quoting Philippians 4:8 and similar verses, often seem to insert an unspoken “only”. “Think about ONLY what is pure, ONLY what is lovely…” Yeah, Quaecumque. A plain look at Paul’s writing as a whole shows that he himself had to talk about what was not pure, lovely,…[Read more]

Thanks for this piece! I’ve only read the first three or four Earthsea books, and I thought Tombs of Atuan was probably the best of them. It invites, almost demands, the sort of theological ruminations that you’ve given us here. I love your advice to your friend – may God grant all of us friends that will speak those words to us.

Thank you Doug, for the reminder that community and service are the context of creative endeavors. Your work has certainly been used by God to build up, or nurture, and stir hunger and wonder sufficient to incline my heart toward my Creator. I hope I can follow your example and keep my efforts focused on Him and on others, rather than self.

I…[Read more]

What Laure said.

Like many doubtless have before me, I have since re-entry told inquirers that I can tell them countless things about Hutchmoot, but everything I can tell them won’t be what Hutchmoot is. We use words far too flimsy for our need, in attempt to capture it: community, united, family. Maybe it’s only in Heaven the word we are reaching for exists; the…[Read more]