Rodney Clapp
The train I ride
Sooner or later, and usually sooner, conversations about passenger trains and Amtrak in particular sputter with the dirty "s-word": subsidies. But all American means of transportation depend on "subsidies."
Superstitious prayers
Faithful prayer asks not merely for healing but for patience and discernment and continuing faithfulness. By comparison, a superstitious act is easy and instantaneous.
Permission not to pray
Just as an injured athlete needs to take a break, my friends needed to take some time to rest. And like the paralytic at Capernaum, they could depend on others' faith and not just their own.
Religion book beat
In my capacity as an editor for Baker Academic and Brazos Press, I annually attend the meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature....
The numbing season
The pressure to keep up a relentless facade of merriment is not a Christian pressure. We may not be able to completely escape this, but perhaps we can lessen it by not confusing it with discipleship.
Why do we call it 9/11?
Despite all the attention given to remembering the al-Qaeda attacks of
September 11, 2001, little attention has been given to one conspicuous
aspect--the event has no name.
Free for what?
Franzen has turned his considerable novelistic talents to a kind of inquisitorial examination of the American ideal of freedom. He shows how freedom is negatively construed—focused on what we are free from and not on what freedom might be for, what worthy ends it might be used to pursue.
Soldiers against torture
Their stories are too little told—the stories of U.S....
The nicotine journal
This summer I reread Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison in Fortress Press's extraordinary new edition of his collected works. Letters and Papers
remains almost endlessly suggestive and stimulating theologically. But
in this reading I noticed how often the imprisoned Lutheran pastor
mentioned tobacco.
Hard of listening
Grandma and Bob got along famously. They complemented one another: Grandma was hard of hearing and Bob was almost blind.
TV's true golden age: Cable for the best drama
The 1950s and 1960s are often cited as the golden age of television. Those were the days when comedians such as Groucho Marx and writers such as Rod Serling worked in the business....
When sin goes viral: A technological analogy
Adam is . . . scattered throughout the globe. Set in one place, he fell and, as it were, broken small, he has filled the whole world....
Fog of the culture war: Wisdom from Lincoln
The earliest occurrence of what church historians call a jeremiad happened before there was a United States....
God the insomniac: Boundless grace
Apparently insomnia is a family trait. My mother often lies awake at night. Her father (my grandfather) was a man of immense energy who routinely read until 1 or 2 a.m.I recall lying awake as a child, listening to murmurs of the television shows my parents were watching. As an adult I developed the sometime and uneasy rhythm of one night of wakefulness until 3 or 4 in the morning, followed by a night of a full eight hours’ sleep. I decided long ago not to lie awake in the dark. Instead I read or listen to music.
My life as an acolyte: Humble but wholehearted work
When my daughter became a teenager, she was invited to serve as an acolyte at our Episcopal church. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to do with her....
Booting up books: The codex will survive
Hardly a day passes without someone declaring the death of the book. Recently Lisa Miller of Newsweek viewed an electronic edition of the Bible that was replete with linked maps, a commentary and dictionary, and 700 paintings depicting biblical scenes. Astonished, she sputtered, “This is the beginning of the end of the Word.”Theologically, the future of the Word as the Bible remains assured. That is because the God met in Israel and Jesus Christ acts in history, and the church (as well as the synagogue) can give no remotely adequate account of its faith and practice without resort to the memory of a story that's been preserved via the spoken and written word.
Bits of history: Intriguing tidbits
Some intriguing tidbits of American history that I gleaned from recent reading:
...Waiting room: Summer of anger
If 1967 was America’s Summer of Love, 2009 will be remembered as the Summer of Anger. Town halls became “town hells” and tempers flared on the Internet and across other media.
...
CC recommends
Skip the American movie version of this story and view the series made by BBC for television....