Just Thinking

Holy Saturday reading

In this issue of The Other Journal, Eric Severson has an essay about Holy Saturday, the "hiatus in the Christian passion story." I read it this morning and while much of it was over my head, I came away with some new things to think about regarding what this mysterious and silent day may be about. You can find "Listening on the Day of Silence: Khora and Holy Saturday" online here.

Image Journal's Twentieth Anniversary Issue

 I want to spread the word about a tremendous milestone for a wonderful journal. The 20th Anniversary issue of IMAGE (Art, Faith, Mystery) will soon be available on bookstore shelves and mailed to subscribers. Included are contributions by Kathleen Norris, Ron Austin, Robert Cording, Thomas Lynch, Stanley Hauerwas, Valerie Sayers, Makoto Fujimura, Tim Hawkinson, Mary McCleary, Joel Sheesley, Roger Wagner, Ruth Weisberg, Theodore L. Prescott, Wayne Adams, Alfonse Borysewicz, Catherine Prescott, James Romaine, Ron Hansen, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Sam Phillips, and more. New subscribers will get this issue FREE. Click here for more info. I've been a subscriber for about four or five years and just renewed so as not to miss an issue, this one in particular.

The New Mommy Track: U.S. News & World Report

The cover of U. S. News & World Report September 3 issue caught my eye yesterday when I took it in from the mail, but I didn't get a chance to read the cover story–"The New Mommy Track"–until lunchtime today. While I applaud the publication for giving coverage of innovative ways that women combine work and family, particularly women with young children, the focus of the coverage on lawyers, bankers, executives, and entrepreneurs who design gadgets that make a million implies that innovative solutions to the work/family dilemma are out of reach for women with less flashy job titles and descriptions.

About 14 years ago, when my youngest son was about to start kindergarten, I negotiated a telecommuting arrangement with my employer, a large healthcare system. It was the first telecommuting arrangement approved in that system. And trust me, I was not one of its lawyers or key executives. It worked really well for about seven years, and through two bosses, until I resigned to start full-time freelance writing. Four years into this arrangement, I published a short article in a national magazine outlining the steps to working out a telecommuting arrangement with an employer. I mention all this here as an encouragment to any woman who may have read the story in U.S. News and felt excluded from possibility.

If you'd like a copy of that article I wrote, "Homework," send me an e-mail and I'll send you back a copy. (You may find it a bit outdated in that it doesn't mention cell phones, but consider the date–1997.)

Pray-as-you-go until Pentecost

Good news. The Jesuits in Britain have decided to continue the pray-as-you-go mp3 prayer/devotionals they began on Ash Wednesday at least until Pentecost Sunday, June 4. As of the beginning of Holy Week, 150,000 prayer sessions had been downloaded. Since learning of them earlier in the season, I've listened to them most weekdays during Lent and thought they were excellent.

Audio meditations for Lent

The Jesuits in Britain have produced a marvelous resource for Lent, "Pray-as-you-go" devotionals. For each weekday of lent, there is a ten-minute mp3 file that you can listen to online or download. Each devotional includes beautiful music (in varying styles from day to day), Scripture reading(s), and some short insightful comments or questions about the reading. The tone is calm and worshipful. On their site, you can even listen/download some breathing and relaxation exercises to help prepare you for a peaceful ten minutes. There is also an mp3 to listen to at the end of the day as a of review of the day.

(HT: Steve Bogner at Catholicism, Holiness, and Spirituality)

Mars Hill Review

Mars Hill Review, a very fine journal of "essays • studies • reminders of God", ceased publication September 2005–unfortunately. Fortunately, however, the editors are making available single back issues in hard copy ($15) or electronic file ($5), or all 25 issues on a CD for $55.

Einstein and the mind of God

This weekend's topic on the radio program Speaking of Faith is "Einstein's God". From host Krista Tippett's email newsletter: "With physicists Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies, and through the words of Albert Einstein himself, we explore Einstein’s way of thinking about mystery, eternity, and the mind of God."

Check the program's website for your local radio listing or listen online at your convenience. Explore the website for lots of extras including links to some of Einstein's writing and an abbreviated transcript of the audio program with links to resources and references.

Next weekend's program is "Einstein's Ethics".

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On C. S. Lewis

With "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" opening one week from today, Bob Smietana, editor of The Covenant Companion and author of the "god-of-small-things" blog, has two timely-placed articles out about C.S. Lewis, one in The Covenant Companion (click on December 2005, "Not a Tame Writer") and the other in Christianity Today. Both are worth a read.

Also worth a read is an article by Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthlyand professor of political science at Rhodes College, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In "For the Love of Narnia", Nelson challenges the opposition of Philip Pullman--author of His Dark Materials series--to Lewis's Narnia series.

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This week on Speaking of Faith: the soul in depression

This week's Speaking of Faith radio program is "The Soul in Depression." I haven't listened to it yet but can imagine that this episode will be as thought provoking as the others. The program will explore the spiritual aspect of clinical depression and its aftermath with author Andrew Solomon, Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer, and poet and psychologist Anita Barrows. In host Krista Tippett's email journal, she writes,

I took the making of this program as an occasion to walk myself with some trepidation back through the spiritual territory of despair. Like many millions of people, I have experienced severe, clinical depression. And I think that "depression" is one of the most misleading and inadequate words in our vocabulary. When I try to describe the experience, I find myself grasping to say what it is not. Depression is not essentially about being sad, or down, or blue, though these may be symptoms. In the illuminating language of Andrew Solomon in this week's program, the opposite of depression is not happiness — it is "human vitality." It can have purely physiological origins. It may be triggered by old sadnesses grown unbearable or anger turned inward, as one saying goes. But it becomes a way of being in, and moving through, the world.

Ignatius Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuit order, spoke of "desolations" — a better word than depression, in my mind — that "lead one toward lack of faith and leave one without hope and without love. One is completely listless, tepid, and unhappy, and feels separated from our Creator and Lord." For me, depression was not so much about being without faith or hope or love; it was, rather, not being able to remember knowing those things, not being able to imagine ever experiencing them again.

You can find the program's local listings at the program's website. You will also find there resources, including book excerpts, poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, partial program transcripts, audio outtakes, as well as the opportunity to listen online.

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For your listening pleasure

During our recent car trip, we listened to a couple interesting mp3's in the car. I recommend them both.

10 Uncommon Insights About Evil in the Lord of the Rings.

A recording of a lecture Peter Kreeft gave a couple years ago at the MacLaurin Institute at the University of Minnesota. Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of a number of books.

Faith Fired by Literature

An episode of Speaking of Faith, a public radio program hosted by Krista Tippett. This episode is a discussion with Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Elie compares and contrasts the pilgrimages of Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, southern writer Flannery O'Connor, philosophical novelist Walker Percy, and journalist and social activist Dorothy Day.

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