Issue 10: Psychopathology

Jenifer Hartsfield uses monotype and intaglio prints to follow rhyming verse in this art exhibit that explores the tension of forces inside ourselves.

Tell the universe what you’ve done Out in the desert with your smoking gun Looks like you’ve been having too much fun Tell the universe what you’ve done Chorus You’ve been projecting your shit at the world Self-hatred tarted up as payback time You can self-destruct—that’s your right But keep it to yourself if you […]

The Other Journal (TOJ): One of the main arguments of your book, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, is that psychoanalysis is a theological parody, and that psychoanalytic intervention is a parody of the intervention of Christ. To begin to understand how psychoanalysis is a theological parody it seems important to understand how you use the idea of […]

Men and women today are haunted by a sense that in the midst of plenty, our lives seem barren. We are hungry for a greater nourishment of the soul. In the England of today, a businessman turned philosopher, Charles Handy, has won a widespread following with his writing. Capitalism, he argues, delivers the means but […]

Review: Broken English, Directed by Zoë Cassavetes, Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2007. 98 minutes. Why is it that as we grow older and stronger The road signs point us adrift and make us afraid Saying, “You never can win,” “Watch your back,” “Where’s your husband?” Oh I don’t like the signs that the sign makers made. […]

In a recent negative critique (a kind way of saying rant against) of the phenomena of U2charist services being undertaken at a number of churches worldwide,The Other Journal writer John Totten challenges the move as two fold liturgical error. On the one hand, Totten believes Bono has not sufficiently focused on the liturgical challenges of the […]

In this poem, Janet Sunderland powerfully connects an encounter with the natural world to the everyday darkness of death and war and hopelessness.

The Other Journal (TOJ): Much of your work is an attempt to trace the genealogy of the nation state, searching out its arbitrary moments and constitutive myths. What are some of the dominant myths that you see currently continuing in legitimating the state’s power and how it maps social relations today? Bill Cavanaugh (BC): I […]

Andy Barnes explores the relationship between the music of Nick Drake and Sufjan Stevens and in particular their apocalyptic imagery.

After twenty-five years of counseling over 7,000 women with eating disorders, reflecting on what could lead someone to starve herself to death, or to consume 20,000 calories a day punctuated by self-induced vomiting, we ask ourselves: What has gone wrong in our relationship with our bodies? There are three aspects of modern Western culture that […]

No other word gathers up in a single stitch the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, the moral, the ecological, the social, the cosmological, and the theological character of the brokenness of human life and of all of creation. To be able to use the word “sin” is to be able to speak with honesty about who we […]

In this short story, Marjorie Maddox provides an insightful and poetic look into the lives of people with masochistic pathologies, people who when “eating an apple [bite] right into the bruise” and can’t help but perpetuate relational and psychological self-harm.

A dear friend, despite her poverty, does all she possibly can to give three children an upbringing full of dignity and hope. A group of friends dances for nearly five hours at an engagement party. Word Made Flesh staff enjoy a fabulous dinner together with great food and wine during the last night of the […]

Fewer measuring devices have more destructive power than those with which we measure ourselves in comparison to others. Those devices are anchored in the power of envy. Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that cannot be enjoyed by the sinner. Lust at least leaves its sinner titillated. Pride leaves the sinner […]

Many contemporary people, scholars and non-scholars alike, think of the deadly sin of sloth as “mere” laziness. In the words of Evelyn Waugh, “[‘Sloth’] is a mildly facetious variant of ‘indolence,’ and indolence, surely, so far from being a deadly sin, is one of the world’s most amiable of weaknesses. Most of the world’s troubles […]

Ellen Jantzen pushes the bounds of conceptual art with her exhibit of elemental and provocative imagery.

This article is a first-hand account of the unrest in Bolivia, with mobs protesting against brothels and women who prostitute.

An interview with Eugene McCarraher.

In this interview, Charles Marsh examines political movements within Evangelicalism and encourages a reclamation of the language of peace in future Evangelical movements.

Jenson’s article explores the nature of sin in humanity as being curved in on oneself, which has manifestations in men and women as pride and sloth, respectively. Tracing the thought on inward curvature from Augustine to Luther and Barth, and looking at modern feminist critique, Jenson outlines the primary challenges to overcoming a self-focused way of living toward a more outward, Jesus-, and other-focused theological practice.

This article looks at the U2charist phenomenon and the implications of integrating pop music with the Eucharist. The author argues that the conflation of the rock group U2 with the Eucharist is a dilution of the table and suggests that we should approach the Eucharist, and music, with more critical minds.

On a cold, cold night in December, just one week before Christmas, a small group stood huddled on a street corner in Galati. Among us were the college-educated and the illiterate; some came from big families; some had no one to call family; some had warm coats to shut out the wind; some had thin […]

A waitress with spiked hair and silver cross earrings showed Tate to a booth near the back. She handed him a plastic menu as he slipped into his seat. His legs ached, and he felt uncomfortably warm. Across the aisle a man wearing a brown vinyl windbreaker sat turning a cup of coffee around in […]

I want to thank Dan for writing such a well thought out and argued piece. The decentralizing call of sexuality has merit, perhaps most especially as we as a church and culture struggle to find our way to the experience of sexual relating that was intended when God gave us the desire to love and celebrate […]

In the twenty-first century, as in the first, we do not wage war against flesh and blood, but against “powers and principalities in the heavens” who increasingly would have us believe we are merely flesh and blood and therefore must cling to this life alone as the only one we will ever have, infected by […]

Lying is something that most people do everyday. From the obvious lies told for the purpose of getting ahead in life, to what we consider the more benign lies told in order to avoid simple confrontation, lying is an almost expected norm of social interaction in Western society. For most of us, lying is not […]

I don’t do suffering well. In fact, I despise suffering. My daughter’s tears bring out the worst in me. My first thought is “How do I fix this?” It’s easily translated into pastoral care or clinical counseling. “What should I say?” “How can I help?” I’ve been habituated to respond to suffering with answers. It’s […]

Call me naïve. I don’t understand how a person, political party, or cultural movement can sustain rage for any length of time, let alone for months and years. But we are living in a day of sustained rage—political animosity, culture wars, national stereotyping, and religious bigotry. One need only flip from one radio talk show […]

I’ve drawn blood from others, in my childhood, even friends and kin— slit the heavy garment of skin or split sinus caves with the hard hammer of my fist. Very young, I cried if my sister hurt herself. Later, her hot blood slicked my hammering hand— that hurt was, more than hers, my own. And […]

Sloth is a special case among the Seven Deadly Sins. Surely Sloth is one sin of which we pragmatic, hard-working, mother-I’d-rather-do-it-myself Americans are not guilty.  We are a purposeful, driven nation that resonates with Ben Franklin and his Poor Richard’s Almanac—”Early to bed, early to rise.” and all of that. (On the other hand, the phenomenal […]

The Road1, with its impersonal depictions of cannibalism and murder in the aftermath of an unknown apocalypse, is one of the most spiritual novels written in recent years. The contrast may appear stark: how can the brutally physical reveal that which we tend to conceive of as transcendent? There is a long-standing assumption, at least […]

He was a humble man, proud of his craft. A pioneer immigrant, he had very little. But he had a skill. He was a carpenter. He built the pine boxes for the mothers, fathers, and children who didn’t always make it on the new frontier. The most difficult, I am sure, was the box for […]

Newspaper headline Somerset, PA This is the popular miracle to which we bow down, a gasp in our throats, thousands ready to weep, disbelief exhaling relief and not that dark mine of tragedy that keeps collapsing around this tunnel of a country. But there are other wonders too: untelevised, deeper down, the tap-tap-tapping left between […]

I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay. . . . —Augustine, Confessions Our Father in heaven, hallowed be the natural man here below. Lead me in the path of pleasure. May my will be done and make of earth a heaven. Upon my instincts I meditate day and night, I study […]

A Google search for Portland’s Blitzen Trapper and the word “schizophrenic” will result in a library of alt-weekly reviews of the new Sub Pop signees’ buzz-worthy, self-released album Wild Mountain Nation. Waiting for their show at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle, I discussed with Trapper’s Marty Marquis, Brian Adrian Koch, and Eric Manteer the idea […]

Introduction Brian McLaren’s newest book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope1 was released in bookstores on October 2, 2007.  The Other Journal is grateful to have received an advance copy from McLaren and to have had the opportunity for an extended in-person conversation in Toronto about issues related to what he describes […]

In this poem, Jeffrey Johnson considers the passage of time.