Here are a few short, expressive pieces I wrote last year that don’t fit anywhere in particular. Hope you enjoy! Prompt: “Compare and contrast the city/city life with nature/rural life” That great concrete jungle beckons the ambitious masses, but there is no true wilderness, no true adventure within its limits. It echoes with the neutered …
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The Wind of the Winds
Myriad places of natural beauty in the world seem to have a “presence” or “spirit” about them. One notices this spirit by being present and paying attention to the environment. At the same time, its ways seem elusive, and even transient. “The wind—the spirit—blows where it wills, but you do not know where it comes …
A “Maximally Personal” Understanding of the Incarnation
What does it mean that God is “personal”? Roughly speaking, that he is “like us” in many ways. But for Jews and Christians, it is actually we who are like him: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). …
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Healing Chaos, Transcending Order
It’s an odd thing, perhaps, to eagerly anticipate a book of rules, given that the only rule in our atomizing cultural zeitgeist is that there should be no rules. But Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life is exactly the volume that I and many others have craved from the pen of psychologist Jordan Peterson. …
Shall We Become Ocean?
What is the ocean? What is the sound of the depths? Shall we “become” the ocean? These are the questions John Luther Adams calls forth in his compelling orchestral piece, “Become Ocean”. The listener quickly realizes that the floodgates of melody and harmony have been breached, and water flows through them as it pleases–sometimes as …
Augustine’s Modern-Day Meaning Crisis
Readers of the Confessions know how surprisingly relevant this ancient masterpiece is to our modern age. In the process of interleaving his intellectual development with his personal confusion and consternation over his lifestyle and relationships, Augustine speaks to many facets of human experience. Far from being a dry patristic tract, Confessions paints a picture of …
A Study of the Solar Eclipse — Prize Edit
A year ago I kicked off this blog with the post A Study of the Solar Eclipse. I later revised this piece and submitted it to a writing contest at my college, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I won the second-place prize for the piece–you can find the contest results here. Below I’ve posted the prize-winning …
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The Ruach Prayer
Last year I had the privilege of visiting one of America’s lesser-known national parks, Great Sand Dunes (on the same trip that I experienced sunrise in the San Juan Mountains). Nestled in a bay-like formation between Colorado’s soaring Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the vast Rio Grande river valley to the west …
Reflections on The Resurrection of the Son of God
I recently finished New Testament scholar N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, one of the most thorough surveys of resurrection belief in the Jewish and Christian traditions. This academic 700+ page tome is just a fraction of Wright’s larger project of documenting the origin of Christian belief and the question of its …
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The Epistemology of Experience
Recently I’ve had long discussions (and debates) with a good friend of mine, a Millennial, on topics such as religion, sex, morality, and more. This friend, while not an atheist/materialist, would identify as “spiritual but not religious” and has a strong aversion towards organized religion and dogma. In these discussions I noticed a curious way …
scribo discere 