Jo-Ann Badley and Stephanie Neill propose that the current interest in food in North American culture redresses cultural patterns of detachment in ways consonant with New Testament practices of communion, calling us to gratitude and recognition of the relational character of human living.
After an earnest fifteen-year abstention from meat, Alissa Herbaly Coons finds solace in the stockpot, coming to terms with her place in the food chain and the glory to be found in the breaking not only of bread, but of bones as well.
Elizabeth Antus argues that an engagement with the work of best-selling author Geneen Roth enables Christians, especially women, to articulate resistance to the body-hating cycle of dieting and bingeing so prominent in US culture.
In “The Catch,” Long offers the image of a fisherwoman, carrying the “stunned pewter” of her catch, to market. In “Esau’s Portion,” we are brought to the hospital cafeteria and the funeral potluck, where Long hungers for the memory of one lost: “what I lack is the thanks you made me take in, bowed down, at the end of any given day.”
The stories we tell about ourselves and our faith are important, says Chelle Stearns, and in this essay she looks at how our athletic culture informs those stories. Taking her cue from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Stearns searches for a middle ground in our faith and Christology between the heroism of warriors and the heroism of healers.
Writer Jeanne Murray Walker offers a mediation on leaving church and finding fellowship and peace at Produce Junction.
Brian Bork writes about the ways that America’s post 9/11 “patriotism” surfaced in cheap country pop, and how the artistry of Springsteen’s “The Rising” captured the real heart and soul of a mourning nation.
The tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” turns on the question of how to see the emperor: is he clothed in garments befitting someone of his noble station, or is he parading in nothing more than his birthday suit, exposed as vain and conceited? Likewise, Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine turns on the question of how […]
In “Trees,” Jesus’ condemnation reenacts itself under a cherry tree, the red fruit hanging in “fistfuls” on a monastery hill.
