Purewow for the week:
We were going to post a giveaway this week, but we felt inferior when we saw this: the chance to win 34 N.T. Wright volumes on Kurt Willems’s Patheos blog. Just go there already! we are saying to no one because you’ve already left in favor of signing up. (But come back?)
What, exactly, is an “incorrect promise”? And how much would we have liked to use this phrase when we were 16 and trying to convince our parents that we weren’t lying about going to that one party?
Yes, we have our opinions, convictions, gut feelings. 26 individual stories of abortion in this week’s New York Magazine. Juxtaposed with Ariel Levy’s harrowing narrative of miscarriage this week, we are feeling particularly heavy and particularly moved.
OKAY YOU KNOW WE HAD TO POST THIS WESLEYAN BEAUT: “Why John Wesley Matters for 21st Century Mission.”
The Kvetching Order (or why you can only complain to someone in a bigger ring than you). An interesting approach, though there seems some obvious holes in the theory: are you supposed to guess/assume how bad someone has it?
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned the Arcade Fire’s Reflektor and its relationship to Kierkegaard.The folks at Mockingbird have extrapolated what the “passionless age” means from the album here.
The 2014 Vulnerability Index is released and, as was evidenced this last week, the Philippines has moved up in the ranks.
“There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted.” Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal is released this week and a few of our favorites are talking about it. Also, over at The New Yorker.
There are a number of questions we had been meaning to ask the next liberal Rabbi we came across, and this week we had our chance. The poetic and thoughtful Rachel Barenblat responds to our wonderings.
The capital-C Church has something to learn here from Ross Douthat about the need for synthesis in a “Francis Era”:
In particular, instead of the capaciousness, the openness to paradox and mystery, the spirit of both/and rather than either/or that’s supposed to define Christian belief, the Catholic civil war has tended to elevate cruder binaries instead – implying that believers need to choose God’s love and God’s justice, between the immanent and the transcendent, between solidarity with the marginalized and doctrinal fidelity . . .
“5 Churchy Phrases That Are Scaring Off Millennials” and “Millennials As Parents: Five Myths–And One Simple Truth.” I guess 5 and 5 makes for 10 more ways Millennials are dominating editorial and taking names, although we must admit we are growing weary of the hype.
What are YOU reading this week?