I wrote this in response to a fascinating Harper's essay about the ruination of the arts by identity obsession. "If beauty can save the world, maybe it can even save the art world." frontporchrepublic.com/2025/02/subser…

Last year's palms from Palm Sunday become this year's ashes for Ash Wednesday. Happy Feast of the Transfiguration to you all! Christ Church Davis

For Ash Wednesday, the first sonnet sequence in English, penned by Anne Locke & based on Ps 51

It's the kids that get me on Ash Wednesday. My own, certainly. (Lord, may I not live to see the day they return to dust!) This year it was the kindergartner in her unicorn jammies with the hood, whose thick blonde bangs I had to part to impart the ashes. Lord, have mercy.

Follow the story, see where it leads.

25 March is the date that J.R.R. Tolkien chose for the day when the One Ring was destroyed. It is the traditional date of both the Annunciation to Mary and Jesus's crucifixion. It is the date which marks the triumph of life over the forces of evil and death.

Packing lightly for a 48hr retreat and apparently I need a minimum of 5 books to feel at peace in the world.

Evelyn Waugh’s writing advice to Merton:

Retired pastor couple at church yearly send an Easter Monday email to staff detailing all the things they were thankful for and noticed over Holy Week. The stuff only people who have experience behind the scenes would notice. I aspire to be this kind of retired pastor someday.

Aleah Marsden A pastor in his 60s once reflected how young people want to write books on parenting, whereas people his age (with grown kids) would rather write books on prayer.

"Bad storytellers make spells. Great storytellers break them." — Martin Shaw, Courting the Wild Twin

Go to church today. "Your home church is a family of the Father united as the body of the incarnate Son, indwelt by the Spirit. Your mundane, apparently pathetic little church is the greatest mystery in the universe." – Peter Leithart

Genuinely confused as to why a CRCNA publication (Network- "an online community where CRC people can get together") would form a cohort of contributors that includes a writer who is not CRC (Pentecostal Tabernacle). crcna.org/news-and-event…

Brad East is back with a follow up to his Goldilocks Protestantism piece. This is the landscape current CRCNA congregations (as well as those departing) face. We have choices to make. I know where I want us to put our chips.

10 reasons to celebrate the Ascension, from John Witvliet, a thread:

Neocalvinism represents a rich tradition, with much to offer the contemporary world church and secular culture, but it also has much to learn from other traditions—or from earlier phases of its own tradition. – Al Wolters HT Aleah Marsden

Al Wolters back in 2005 with some things here for the present and future of the CRCNA

I'm reading Stanley Hauerwas' "A Community of Character" right now. This paragraph leapt off the page at me yesterday.