In its heyday, Dexter was one of my favorite television shows. A serial killer with a code of honor to only kill “really bad” people? I’m captivated. I mean, my love of Dexter wasn’t really surprising; most popular television shows of late are probably going to draw me in given their care for the complexity […]
Mockingbird and Valley
at the corner of Mockingbird and Valley, I saw the dogwood there coated in ice, feigning warmth of the coming of the Kingdom and hoped the coming of Spring would suffice as the children in pink and blue bonnets were busy building a sandcastle of snow, I listened to what is really within me and […]
St. Simons and Seashells by the Seashore
On the coast of St. Simons Island in the Golden Isles of southern Georgia, you’ll find Spanish moss dangling off the branches of the old oak trees, dolphins and manatees gliding about in the waters as the sun rises, and a rich history tied to John and Charles Wesley, two brothers who both spent time […]
The Vulgar Call them Christians
theirs is the American god whom fear of struck fear of those not fearing quite the same, and cloaked in pretty politik they’ll shame those they can shame in Christianease, they’ll please with pleas and so empowered, claim that right is right and wrong is given to some other name, a simpler world, in black-and-white, […]
New Year
the years they slough off the flesh dead or alive, from the inside or out leaving in their wake some hollow gap, like snakeskin and memories of what once wasn’t, this life of shedding, but we are wont to find the skin and not the snake, not anew, instead to hold the old like some […]
Nataraja
You dance upon the earth, twirling lace colors like fire- fighting the air for attention with feet marching into the ground and each soft stomp your command to make new every goddamned minute with eyes closed to a sea beyond what’s made by the wave of each arm that to dance is to snake among […]
What Advent Isn’t
I have this sneaky suspicion that most Christians don’t really understand what advent is. Or, rather, it’s not that they don’t get what it is so much as they don’t get what it isn’t. Everybody – Christian or not – can tell you that the “reason for the season” is more than Santa and gifts […]
Genesis
I swam the primordial deep you crossed the creek and wrote a song about it, and as I drowned there in the sky, the water-worn firmament, stars caught in the corpulent seaweed, and saw then in the distance Charon’s empty boat, I was more afloat for a moment or so you climbed a tree and […]
When Surface-Level Religion Meets a Psychology of Depth, or Why Camp (or Something Like It) Could Replace Church
Tomorrow morning, thousands of families will pack into their cars – some wearing their Sunday best, others in jeans and a t-shirt – and head once again to a church service like the one they went to last week. For some, there’ll be a choir decked in robes, lighting of the advent candle, a scripture, […]
The Importance of Wounds and Remembering Them
Earlier tonight, I was walking my puggle, Abner, in the backyard after the rain had just ended, and it struck me that there’s this moment when the rain’s stopped falling from the sky but it’s still falling from the trees. You can hear it tapping down on the ground, but the slow drizzle makes it […]
