Creatively Advancing into Novelty
By Jesse Turri I grew up in a little town in North Dakota called Devil’s Lake. Devil’s Lake got it’s name because the Sioux people called the lake nearby mni wak’áŋ chante, or “bad spirit lake.” The word “bad” in the name referred to the high salt content of the lake, making it unfit to…
“Jesus was not a pansy. Nor was Jesus “a prize fighter with a tattoo down his leg, a sword in his hand, and a commitment to make someone bleed,” as Mark Driscoll has contended. “Fight Club” may have been a good movie, but it makes for really bad theology. Mark may see things like “kindness,…
The rhetoric of Americans being the good guys and of all the bad guys being out there made me suspicious. I grew suspicious, not only by the irony of Christian calls to war, but by studying. Studying sociology, I learned of the startling Zimbardo prison experiment at Stanford, wherin a dozen students, prescreened for mental…
Fear-as-fuel causes a kind of social global warming, filling our social atmosphere with invisible toxins that subtly, silently, relentlessly change everything and make our society less humane and less habitable. Those who live by the sword, Jesus said, will die by it, and I imagine the same could be said for fear, because the sword…
Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence? The quote above comes from Brian McLaren’s initial reaction to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. I don’t…
“November 11th, commonly known in the United States as Veterans Day, is the feast day of Martin of Tours, venerated by Catholics as the patron saint of conscientious objectors. He was born in what is now Hungary in 316, the son of an officer in the Roman army.” Read more…
As Klaus Wengst writes: “That Pilate had Jesus executed on the cross shows that the death of Jesus is indissolubly bound up with the political peace that there was at that time, the Pax Romana, produced and guaranteed by Roman power. In the view of the procurator this execution, like many others, was virtually an…
This is Just a quick thought about violence. As I was in the process of thinking about conflicts, how and why they occur, and how they can be resolved, I’ve come to the conclusion (probably not an original one) that violence is truly primitive. I think about this subject often and feel passionately about it…
I’m really excited about this special event coming up at Valley Mosaic next weekend. We will be hosting Tracy and Seth Wispelwey for a weekend of conversation, music and creativity. Tracy and Seth are peace activists working toward their earnest desire for reconciliation and transformation through conversations and active engagement in issues of social justice….
Below is an excerpt from the poem Some Further Words, by Mr. Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers. Berry critiques the land he loves with a wise reverence, and although this poem was written decades ago it is timeless and carries special meaning today. The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of…