Annie Dillard died last week. We remembered her with appreciation, and we also learned with some surprise that a very different kind of writer, Eudora Welty, had been chosen by The New York Times to review Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it first appeared...
Last week we sat in silence with John Cage, listening to 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a pianist doing nothing, so the audience could hear everything. That cough two rows back. The radiator ticking. Somebody's stomach growling. Cage wasn't hiding from sound. He was...
American composer John Cage (1912-1992) wrote pieces of music to be played on a variety of objects, including flowerpots, scrapped hoods of old cars, and other pieces of junk. Then he began tinkering with a piano, shoving objects under the strings, including screws, bolts, spoons,...
We weren’t going to write Digging a Deeper Well this week…until a Seth Godin post dropped into our inbox. We’ve been writing about intentionality in ministry of late, and last week we noted the need to intentionally go “one by one by one” in leading...
Less than halfway through Act One of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s wife Linda, seeing him stumble toward oblivion, cries out forcefully to their two distracted sons: I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His...
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Mary Oliver wrote these lines, sometimes titled “Instructions for Living,” when she was approaching her eighth decade of life. Last month, Jonathan Haidt invoked them to frame his NYU commencement address on the importance of “treasuring” one’s attention. We think that...
If your church board feels tired and confused from time to time, trust that you are in good company. Compared to what church boards dealt with in earlier decades, today’s leaders are facing a tsunami of challenges across the world and inside the church. In a...
Ryan Burge, amplifying the results of the longstanding Pew Religious Landscape Survey, wants us to pay closer attention to the data on belief in the United States—and especially the data on what underlies belief. How often are people thinking about the meaning and purpose of...
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32) The two downcast followers of Jesus said this to one another, after Jesus had drawn near to them on the...