What are you looking for?

by Ned Bustard I don’t sport anymore, and I also don’t watch other people sport. Though the world became obsessed with the olympics this summer, I am happy to carve my little blockprints, walk downtown to my local indie bookstore, and drink sweet tea.  Yet . . . volleyball.  Somehow, I love watching volleyball. I was watching volleyball the other day with my daughter Elspeth and was surprised to see that in the middle of a sea of blue uniforms, there was a red shirt on the USA men’s volleyball team. Of course, my first thought was that he would die first in this episode. Then, I remembered that this was the Olympics, not an episode of  Star Trek.  Perhaps the fellow forgot his blue shirt back at the Olympic Village. But, no, that can’t be. This sport thing is too important to the world and to companies marketing their goods to allow one of our sporty youths to wear the wrong shirt. Elspeth then looked it up for me on the interwebs and said it was the “libero.” This information did not help me much, so I texted my volleyball-star nephew, and he explained to me: “The libero, sometimes called the defensive specialist, is a player who plays exclusively in the back row of the court. Using specific substitutions, the libero will switch out with the middles when they get to the back row. They are not allowed to hit in front of the 10-foot line and are usually a shorter player to give them a passing advantage.” Wow, that is a lot to have to say. Instead of saying all that, I suppose they just get the fellow to wear a red shirt. The red shirt was a symbol. I like symbols. This is obvious by even the quickest flip through the pages of Every Moment Holy . Odd and anachronistic things keep popping up in my art: dolphins with anchors, square halos, phoenixes, chalices with bread, butterflies, and bleeding pelicans.  Many will be familiar with symbols used to identify teachings of the Christian faith (the cross, the Lamb of God, and the ichthys), but in my art I also reach for some deeper cuts. At one Hutchmoot years ago I was milling about the Artist’s Row and overheard some ladies wishing that I could just stand next to them and explain all of the symbols in my linocuts. I chose not to interrupt them, but here, for you, I will share my secret decoder ring—or at least some parts of it. If you’d like to see me go into greater detail about the meaning to a host of symbols in Every Moment Holy , I’ve recorded a lecture on that topic for Housemoot 2024 . Buy a ticket, invite your community to your house for a gathering, and dive in.  At the end of each volume of Every Moment Holy,  Doug McKelvey, the author, writes an epic liturgy in praise of Christ. My practice has been to sift through the lines of his beautiful poetry in search of visuals to use for illustrations, to join with them symbols from the history of church art, and then add in other elements that seem to fit thematically or compositionally.  A Liturgy of Praise to the King of Creation In ”A Liturgy of Praise to the King of Creation” Jesus has an unusual halo—a swirl of electrons. This is a reference to Colossians 1:16, “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” All things—even atoms.  This liturgy is overflowing with beautiful imagery, so it was more a matter of what not  to include from the text than struggling to figure out what to include. Below the stars of the Southern Cross are elements to illustrate “You are The King of Sunlight and Storms” while opposite that are symbols that sync with “Ruler of the Grassy Plains” and “the Lord of the Harvest . . . The Grain King.”  Above that is a dolphin with an anchor, a symbol that often appears in Every Moment Holy . Christ is staring at this symbol in particular. This is a symbol for his Bride, the Church, and was often found on graves in Christian catacombs until the third century. The dolphin (Aristotle called them “fishes,” so a large ICTHYS, often said to save drowning sailors in ancient folk tales) winding itself around an anchor points to Christians putting all of their hope in Christ—”We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19). “You are The Monarch of Meadows” is symbolized in a butterfly (a common symbol for a regenerated soul in that it starts out a sinful worm, dies in a cocoon, and emerges as a new creation) and the liturgy’s declaration that Jesus is “King of the Walruses” is represented by, of course, a walrus. The reader prays, “You are the King of the Rabbits, . . . The River God, The Swamp King, King of Glades,” so a rabbit and a turtle appear in the lower corner, chosen both to represent the text and allude to the famous Aesop’s’ Fable, just for fun. The chalice and loaf of bread in the lower right of the linocut print point to the Eucharist and the lines, “You are  . . . The God of Mercy, The God of Redemption. You are The Lord of Love.” At the feet of Christ are two small plants lifted from their spots at the foot of Jesus in my New Creation  print: a shamrock—reminding us that God is three in one—and a tulip, reminding us of the sovereign, unrelenting love of Christ that insures, as the liturgy ends: “There is no corner of creation you will fail to redeem.”  A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Conquered Death In Volume II of Every Moment Holy ends with “A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Conquered Death.” Jesus is pictured with a triangular halo (as a member of the Trinity) and armed for battle with an armor-clad arm and a mighty sword. Behind him is a great mountain, spoken of by the prophet: “On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces . . . In that day they will say, ‘Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.’” (Isaiah 25:7–8a, 9).  Opposite the mountain is the Tree of Life, encircled by a phoenix. The twelve pieces of fruit on the Tree symbolize spiritual authority (twelve tribes, twelve apostles, Jacob had twelve sons, God ordered that twelve loaves of unleavened bread be present in the temple each week, etc.), and the phoenix symbolizes Christ and the resurrection (in mythology a phoenix is alive, dies, and then is reborn).  On the left, Jonah is resurrected from the belly of the great fish (Matthew 12:38–41). Below the fish is the cruel kingdom of death with the great gates of Hell broken and hanging askew, or as this liturgy says, “The door that led to death has been remade by Christ into the door that opens into everlasting life.”  The liturgy also boldly proclaims: “All sorrows we endure for now are but the rattling gasp that signals death’s defeat. Christ’s heel is planted on death’s neck. Death cannot breathe. And this space in which we grieve is but the long exhale of death’s last expiring breath. This age of passing sorrows is but the long death rattle of death itself. The outcome bears no hint of doubt. The work is done. The victory is won.” Therefore, Jesus stands with one foot on the ribcage of Death, his scythe broken, and with his other foot, he crushes the head of the Serpent.  The last image in the illustration is a ram encircled with thorns, a nod to the life that came from the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis and the crown of thorns Christ was crowned with for us on the cross. A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Labors Through His People “O Christ, Exalted Prince of Heaven, O Christ, Radiant King of Earth, Your glories are everlasting. You are the living head of your body, the divine bridegroom of your church.” And so begins “A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Labors Through His People” in volume III of Every Moment Holy . Joining Christ in this linocut illustration is the Bride, the Church of Jesus. Jesus feeds his bride from a plate of five loaves and two fish—a miracle made from the good works the faithful have given up to him, good works he planned for them to do from before the beginning of time.  Jesus wears a cruciform-filled round halo and his bride is crowned by a double halo—a circle and a square, for she exists both in and outside of time. In Christian art, the round halo is reserved for angels and for dead saints, while the square halo identified a living person presumed to be a saint. The shovel in the hand of the Church represents the work of God’s people in general while at her feet are symbols for the work of God’s people more specifically. They include an abacus (mathematics), a magnifying glass (sciences), a hoe (agriculture), a sword (military), a guitar (music), a caduceus (medicine), a box (shipping/warehousing), an apple (education), books (writing/scholarship), a pencil (art), and scales (justice/politics). Twelve bees work industriously and the Holy Spirit carries their home, a hive full of honey (the Scriptures).  The flowers at the bottom of the illustration burst forth in truth and grace, while above it, we see the words “ora et labora” (that is, “pray and work,” the traditional slogan of the Benedictines) proclaimed on a banner flapping in the breeze. Hopefully focusing on these three pieces from the three volumes of Every Moment Holy  will be a help when you try to read into the layers of meaning woven through the linocut prints in these books. And the video that I made for Housemoot 2024  will give you even more insight. But try not to get too wrapped up in decoding every element. Enjoy the whole piece of art as a piece of art. And I will try not to figure out everything about the red shirts in volleyball, but instead, just revel in watching the game. If you want to learn more about the symbolism in Every Moment Holy, watch the lecture Ned created for Housemoot 2024 .

by Chloe Wilcox After visiting Hutchmoot in person in Tennessee, I wanted nothing more than to bring all my friends with me to experience the joy of that gathering, but, given how challenging it can be to get a ticket to Hutchmoot, that may not ever happen. On the other hand, there is always more room for someone to host a Housemoot in their own home with many of the same Hutchmoot speakers. Hosting Housemoot is a rich, joyful “second best” that really isn’t much of a “second” because it is just so good. This will be my fifth year hosting a virtual Rabbity conference at home, and I've developed rhythms and systems that work well for my space and the beautiful group of people excited to join me each year.  I like inviting people to my home rather than trying to find a larger venue. We're comfy and relaxed here, and while it's a small house, it feels a bit hobbity in a way that makes people feel comfortable kicking off their shoes, curling up in an armchair, and making themselves at home. My husband and I haul our big T.V. up from the basement to stream the sessions. I typically have anywhere between five and twelve friends joining me, coming and going through the weekend. When I start planning, I send out a Google doc with all the sessions listed, and ask friends to mark the top three they want to watch. I've realized that planning a full schedule that runs from Friday to Sunday evening works best for my people. However, not everyone is able to come for all of it, so if there is a session that someone really wants to see, we prioritize that talk for when they're able to be here. I type up the proposed schedule and tape it on the wall, and I tell people that my job is just to be the keeper of the schedule so that they have a measure of predictability, but if they need to go for a walk or hide in the library to get some introvert time, they are completely welcome to do so. I try to remind people of something I heard at Hutchmoot: “We have a schedule, but we don’t necessarily have a schedule for you.” I have learned to schedule plenty of “white space” for our weekend. I keep space of at least a half hour between talks to allow time for discussion to grow naturally. By keeping some breathing room in the schedule, I allowed for both predictability and spontaneity. And even though meals are just in the next room and nobody needs to go very far, I like to allow at least an hour and a half for eating. Again, the conversations are usually so good that we want plenty of time for that to happen!   I love that the Rabbit Room provides wonderful recipes, but I want to enjoy the 'Moot as well and not spend too much of my time cooking for people, so we do guided potlucks through the weekend. This has worked really well for years, and we have had some wonderful meals that are easy for each individual to adapt to their needs, whether allergies or dietary preferences, like a low-carb or vegetarian diet. There are always snacks on the table—I start it with some good chocolate and mandarin oranges, then friends usually add cheese, crackers, nuts, and all sorts of lovely things. We typically eat all weekend while watching or discussing the different sessions. I keep ice water, carafes of coffee and hot water, and tea bags out at all times. My husband makes sure there is always coffee! I've also learned that, if I keep art supplies on our kitchen table, friends will write quotes or illustrate something they heard about and I can tape them up on the wall next to the schedule as a growing collage of our weekend. I told my friends that my piano was our personal art gallery, and to please bring their work so that we can see it and enjoy the talent within the group.  As the years have gone on, I've realized that we really, really like keeping Friday and Saturday evenings for "concerts." I’m choosing to save all of the Artistic Interludes for those times. I have found it is a lovely way to end the day because our brains are full and tired and we just needed to be cared for by the beauty of good music.   Having a virtual Moot to share has been a joyful, soul-nourishing way for me to love the people around me. Some previous attendees started asking months ago for the dates for this year’s Moot, so that they could plan well and make sure they could attend the whole thing! It’s becoming a cherished yearly gathering for our little community.

by Karissa Riffel There have been few times in my life when beauty brought me to tears. Once, I was standing on the edge of a cliff on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, looking out over the ocean at Kilt Rock as the gilded sun lit the black volcanic stone and waterfall through the mist. The ocean churned far below in a shimmering expanse of silver and gold. I drank in the sight through watery eyes. Such majesty made me feel miniscule. When you can access most of civilization’s accumulated knowledge through a hunk of metal and glass the size of your palm, it’s easy to forget how small you actually are. The other time was a few days later in Edinburgh, Scotland, a winding, medieval city with layers of history. We attended church on a Sunday morning at St. Giles Cathedral, right along the famous—if a bit touristy—Royal Mile. The building was a feat of architecture, but what I really remember is the singing. A procession of robed choir members trailed down the center aisle, their voices resonating around us from all sides. The experience felt transcendent. Again, I felt small, which was oddly comforting in its own way. I remember thinking, Now, this  is church . Not that other churches conduct their services incorrectly. My own Midwestern Protestant church service is very different than the one at St. Giles. But I thought this was the way one ought to feel in church: enamored by beauty, humbled by the majesty of God.             The Physical World Matters “It’s only your heart that counts,” people often say. This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through , the folk song goes. This fallacy has permeated contemporary Christian culture to the point that we eschew everything in the world, preferring a dangerous, Gnostic ideology that leads us to pursue secret, spiritual knowledge as the only reality—an idea that is closer to Buddhism than the Bible.   However, God did  give us beauty in the physical world. Romans tells us that God has revealed himself to us in creation: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,  in the things that have been made . So they are without excuse” (italics mine). [1] God could have made the universe purely utilitarian, but instead, he made it pleasing to the senses: He made apples sweet, water refreshingly cool, flowers colorful, babies cuddly. This also tells us that, along with goodness and truth, beauty exists necessarily; it is not a subjective human experience, but an objective reality created by God. In her book, This Beautiful Truth,  Sarah Clarkson writes about living with a debilitating mental illness and how God showed himself to her through the beauty of His creation. At first, she sought Truth through the study of theology, hoping for answers in books and intellectual thought, but she came up short. Then, she experienced the goodness of God through the community of others around a sumptuous feast: “God, I finally realized, is not a thought I must think, or a proposition I must know. God is the Lover and Maker, the Friend and Creator, and he makes himself known in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world.” [2]  Jesus himself came as a human in a physical body. Not only did he experience the life of a human, he also suffered and died like one. When he resurrected on the third day, he took special care to make sure the those people he appeared to knew that his body was physical. Although he appeared to his disciples, seemingly impossibly, in a locked room, he had Thomas touch his wounds. Scripture tells us that, as Christians, our own bodies will be transformed into glorified bodies. When the kingdom comes, there will be, not only a new heaven but a new earth.   The physical world is not a prison, a skin we shed when we go to heaven; the earth will be glorified, brought into its true fullness with the consummation of the kingdom of God. The most magnificent waterfall and the most colorful sunset are only dim reflections of the coming glory. Beauty Reminds Us Who God Is So often in the Protestant tradition, Christians tend to approach God with an ease that borders on irreverence. We attend church in buildings that resemble warehouses, wear t-shirts and ripped jeans to Sunday service, and reduce God to something we take alongside our beverages ( All I need is Jesus and coffee! ). We focus on this idea of Jesus being our friend—not untrue, but think about its staggering meaning when one comprehends the greatness of God: that the  creator of the universe  is your friend . Out of the formless void, God spoke life into existence; he took chaos and gave it order. Not only did God breathe the world into being, he sustains it day by day. G.K. Chesterton compares the monotony of nature to the repetition engaged in by children. My daughter is still an infant, but no matter how many times I make a silly cross-eyed face at her, she laughs every time. If she could talk, I imagine she would say “Do it again!” just like the child Chesterton writes about. He says, "For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. [3] James B. Jordan makes an argument that the features of creation are not incidental. God does not use wind as an image of his Spirit; rather he created wind so that he could image his Spirit for us.  The sun is Jesus and the new covenant; the sea is the Gentiles; mountains the nation of Israel. The entire world is God’s revelation to us. [4] Beauty reminds us who God is: all-powerful and yet immanent in our lives and in His world. Let us approach Him with awe and reverence, this God who molded the heavens and makes daisies grow.  Beauty Gives Us a Calling The entire second half of Exodus is spent on the tabernacle. God details special instructions to the Israelites on how to build it, right down to the gold moldings on the lampstands and the construction of the curtains. The finest artisans were charged with carrying out these instructions; both men and women of skill contributed: “every craftsman in whose mind the Lord had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work. God actually filled a man with His Spirit: “with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs.”[1] The details about the Tabernacle in Exodus also point us back to creation. God gives seven speeches, followed by Moses blessing the Tabernacle. In the seventh speech, God commands his people to keep the sabbath, reminiscent of God resting on the seventh day of creation.   This tells us that God not only cares about beauty, but he also wants us to create it. He purposefully imbued artistic ability in His people so that they could build the Tabernacle. We are image-bearers and thus also “sub-creators,” as Tolkien calls us.[5] We create, but only with what God has already made. This means that whether we paint, write, build, or sing, we are imaging God’s creative nature.  In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word for “create” in Genesis 1:1 is poieo  (pronounced “poy-eh-o”) where we get the English word poetry . This term bears the connotation of healing. As image-bearers of God, when we create, we bring about healing in the world—which, of course, is merely a shadow of the ultimate healing God will bring with His kingdom. Human-made beauty like I experienced in the music and architecture at St. Giles Cathedral serves as a reminder of this identity.  Beauty Gives Us a Longing Beauty makes us long for heaven and the consummation of the kingdom of God. Like the princess Psyche in C.S. Lewis’s retelling of “Cupid and Psyche,” we long “to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from…” Psyche tells her sister that place is “my country, the place where I ought to have been born…All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.” [6] I write this as I sit by a cool, clear lake in Canada, surrounded by the sound of gently lapping waves. Pastel pink, blue, and violet are smeared across the sky like paint and reflect in the rippling water. The birds’ calls echo through the trees like a choir. And I cannot think of any better argument for the importance of beauty than this moment. The God of the universe has been wooing us, and indeed he is doing so still. [1] Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2001. Romans 1:20; Exodus 31:1–5; 36:2 [2] Clarkson, Sarah. This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness . Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2021. 71–74  [3] Chesterton, G.K. “The Ethics of Elfland.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Orthodoxy. Accessed August 9, 2023. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html . [4] Jordan, James B. Through New Eyes. Brentwood, Tennessee:   Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1988.  [5] Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” ILAS 2350 - University of Houston. Accessed August 9, 2023. https://uh.edu/fdis/_taylor-dev/readings/tolkien.html . [6] Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. London: William Collins, 2020. Karissa Riffel is a wife, mom, and English teacher. Her short fiction has appeared in various literary magazines and in an anthology by Nightshade Publishing. Her nonfiction is forthcoming by the Anselm Society and CiRCE Press. She is co-host of the podcast Lit Ladies, and she writes about art and faith on her Substack Midnight Ink.

This article is by Lanier Ivester, author of Glad and Golden Hours: A Companion for Advent and Christmastide , available today from Rabbit Room Press. by Lanier A. Ivester In setting out to write a book, it is important to acknowledge who you are writing it for. This book is not for the polished or the elite, the people who have it all or who have it all together. It is not for social media influencers seeking inspiration to curate little squares of perfection on the internet, or for those seeking to impress other people with their cooking or decorating or craft-making or gift-giving. It is, however, for the dear souls mentioned in Edmund Hamilton Sears’s verse, people crushed by life, toiling along under heavy burdens, desperate for a place of rest. It is for those who long to be re-enchanted by the very old, very true, very beautiful story of Christmas. It is for someone who might never have experienced a truly sacramental holiday in their own homes—and by sacramental, I mean quite simply a holiday which articulates unseen realities in practical, tangible ways. It is for the weary, the homesick, the wistful, and the countercultural. It is, above all, for the childlike, for it is only to such hearts that the greatest mysteries are unveiled. I remember the first time I encountered Sears’s lyric. I was playing Christmas carols on the piano in my childhood home when the words fairly leapt off the page. I stopped playing and read them again. Then I typed them up on the computer in a large font, printed them out, and taped them to the refrigerator where everyone in the family could see them every day. I thought the words were beautiful, but something told me that the experience they pointed to was lovelier still. At seventeen years old, I confess that my sensibilities engaged more readily with the promise of those “glad and golden hours” than with any Dantean fellowship of suffering souls in their purgatorial climb. But I loved the idea of Christmas being more than a holiday. It was a resting place . At the same time, I saw so many unhappy attitudes about Christmas in the world around me—from the jaded ennui of my peers to the haggard exhaustion of adults (mostly women), and I longed to remind the whole world that Christmas was still and always would be an absolute miracle. It was worth all the fuss and bother, the messes and the memories; it was, as Washington Irving had said, “king of the year,” for the King of creation had dignified the human race with his presence in our midst. No earthly shadow should diminish the glory of what those angels were singing about in the Bethlehem sky, and no amount of effort was too great for so grand a cause.   But I wasn’t the one doing all (or even most of) the work to bring this glory down into the practical experience of the people I loved best. That lot fell to my mother, and, as much as she treasured it, sometimes it made her tired. Sometimes, it even made her a little exasperated, like on Christmas Eve when my sister and I generated yet another unplanned mess in the kitchen, or an unexpected guest dropped in with an unexpected present, which sent Mama scurrying for the gift stash in the back of her closet for some suitable offering in exchange. There was the year that our pipes froze and then burst on Christmas morning, and the year that the goose she had been basting all day long with brandy and apricot glaze turned out to be full of shot and therefore inedible. There were Christmases spent on the phone with the doctor when my sister was too sick to get out of bed, and there were years in which Mama was stretched so thin with homeschooling three children that the holidays must have felt less like twelve days of merriment and more like the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Nevertheless, Christmas in our house was a magical respite from the rest of the year; a time in which time itself seemed to bend to the greater laws of divine and familial affection. Looking back, I know it cost my mother considerable effort, enormous intention, and great love. But I hailed those glad and golden hours in my heart because they had always been just that. Mama had seen to it. I remember standing in the kitchen one Christmas with one of Mama’s friends. It was a different year, but still, the Sears lyric was taped to the fridge—a bit dog-eared from being removed and replaced over successive holidays. She paused to read it, and then she laughed. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said with a shake of her head. “But who has time to rest  this time of year?” Her words, and the tone in which they were spoken, made me feel self-conscious and green. What did I, an idealistic teenager, know of real weariness, or even of real rest, for that matter? People were tired, and sometimes the holidays were just really hard. Not everyone had grown up in a home where the good times far outweighed the bad times, and some people had reason to distrust some of the sentiment and excesses of Christmas. Nevertheless, something in me silently pushed back. I knew that Christmas did not have to be a desperate round of commitments and tasks. I knew that even the humblest experiences could be shot through with eternal radiance and that there had to be some middle ground between “too much” and “not enough,” some lovely, overlooked via media  that could cut through the thickets of overdoing and overwhelm (and overeating and overspending!) with which a modern holiday has come to be associated. There was more going on here than childhood memories and food nostalgia, more even than the simple acknowledgment of Christ’s birth. In celebrating Christmas, we were not just remembering; we were reliving  the fact that God had become one of us. Later, as I started to tease out some of these intimations in my own home, I began to understand just how tricky it could be to create a meaningful holiday without losing sight of what it was all about. Christmas was a resting place, but it was one that must be cared for and cultivated. Preparations were important, particularly if I wanted to give my people a thoughtful taste of a coming kingdom that was already in our midst, but those preparations would always have to give way to the people themselves, not the other way around. Furthermore, even the most sacramentally intentional Christmas could be a lot of work, a sort of practical liturgy of generosity, hospitality, attention, and love, and sometimes I would get tired. Sometimes I would lose my bearings, or my way, or my temper, or my peace, and need to be shepherded back to my soul’s rest. And always, I would need the sweet simplicity of Christ. For over two decades, I have grappled joyously with these tensions because I believe that there is gold at their heart. I believe that it is not only possible, but crucial, to steward these set-apart days in a way that makes space for mystery and wonder amid the rituals and traditions of our lives. And I believe that ritual and tradition are always the servants of relationship, with God and with other people. Without relationship, even the most exquisite holiday is about as lovely as a child banging a pot with a stick. And so, if you are tired, or disillusioned, or curious about shaping a holiday season that makes present the astonishing fact of God-with-us, then I would like you to consider this book my gift to you. It’s not a manual or a how-to, or a glorified to-do list, but a companion, in the neighborliest sense of the word. Whether you choose to read this book, this story, simply to enter into its twists and turns, its hopes and sorrows, its people and its places, or whether you elect to participate in it yourself via its many recipes, crafts, and holiday suggestions, my prayer is that you will find a friend in these pages and that the ideas and activities with which these reflections are threaded will be like small domestic liturgies, tangible acts that integrate what we believe with what we do. You might try only a single recipe or craft each week, or even each year; you are welcome to pick and choose, selecting only that which suits your needs and desires. For the meals and menus and ideas in these pages, even the suggestions themselves, are merely that: suggestions to help you contemplate your own holiday with creativity and significance.  It is, above all, an invitation, regardless of your age, marital status, or living situation, to experience Christmas as a place of rest—not in spite of, but in the very midst of the merriment of these glad and golden hours. His glory is already breaking over the rim of the world, my friends. Let us turn eastward—with the devotion of our hearts and the work of our hands—and watch for the steady rise of our great Daystar. Lanier Ivester is a homemaker and writer in the beautiful state of Georgia, where she maintains a small farm with her husband, Philip, and an ever-expanding menagerie of cats, dogs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and peacocks. She studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, and her special area of interest is the sacramental nature of everyday life. For over a decade she has kept a web journal at lanierivester.com , and her work has also been featured in The Rabbit Room, Art House America, The Gospel Coalition, and The Cultivating Project, among others. She has lectured across the country on topics ranging from the meaning of home to the integration of faith and reason, and in both her writing and her speaking she seeks to honor the holy longings of a homesick world. She is also the author of Glad and Golden Hours from Rabbit Room Press.

by Noah Guthrie Our tuxedo cat, Gretl, has many quirks. She still suckles her fur at the age of seven, stretches herself across the stairs right as you go down, and casually walks away from you after meowing for attention. She also enjoys Christmas hymns. When the winter holidays come and my family sings around a wreath of pink and purple Advent candles, Gretl will often pad toward us to listen. She’ll flick her black, white-tipped tail as though it were a needle weaving our voices together. This habit of Gretl’s may be one of the reasons my younger sisters sometimes gush, “She’s a Christian cat!” Their words are playful, but they suggest a serious question. What does Christ mean for non-human creatures? If we’re to go a step further, we may also wonder: how does the Bible shape our understanding of the more-than-human world as a whole, with its soils, waters, and interlocking landscapes? Like many of those involved with the Rabbit Room, I’m a creative writer, and I also work for a faith-based environmental nonprofit called A Rocha USA . Whatever the Bible says about nature, I believe it impacts both aspects of my work: art and conservation. In light of that, my hope for this post is to offer an overview of the biblical basis for environmental advocacy, starting with creation, progressing to the Israelite land ethic, then concluding with the cosmic scope of Jesus’ salvation. Creation and its Caretakers Luckily, we don’t have to go far in the Bible to figure out God’s views on nature. At the very start of the Torah, we find that nature is God’s creation (Gen. 1:1), that it’s diverse and overflowing with life (Gen. 1:21, 1:25), and that it’s good, good, good, and very good (Gen. 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:31). In Genesis, nature’s value doesn’t hinge on its usefulness to human beings. Well before humans even come into existence (which happens on the “sixth day” of the narrative), God sees all of creation—plants, animals, terrains, and astral bodies—as “good.” Moreover, God blesses the birds and sea creatures independently of humans (Gen. 1:22), and he makes a covenant with all the creatures that emerge from Noah’s ark (Gen. 9:8-11). This indicates that all sorts of non-human species, whether in land, sky, or sea, are recipients of God’s blessings and covenant faithfulness. While God does distinguish humans as bearers of the imago dei  (Gen. 1:26-7), much of the Genesis creation account establishes the commonalities between human and non-human creatures. As David Clough observes in the first volume of his theological treatise On Animals , the Hebrew in these passages refers to both humans and non-humans as nephesh hayyah , or “living creatures” (Clough 31). God shapes all of these creatures from dust and divine breath (Gen. 1:30, 2:7, 2:19), and Genesis describes all of them as eating, reproducing, and bearing God’s approval as “good” creations.  In short, Genesis doesn’t depict nature as a mere tool for human ends—or worse, a temporary, carnal “test” posed to humanity before they can escape to a world of pure spirit. Instead, it describes nature as a tapestry of lands, species, and energies that are each good in and of themselves. Moreover, humans are created as one member of a family of dust-and-spirit creatures, nephesh hayyah , and they receive the responsibility to “work and keep” the land where God has placed them (Gen. 2:15). Since they’re made in the image of servant-king (Gen. 1.27; cf. John 13:13-14), we may infer that God intends humanity to emulate Jesus’ sacrificial love in their “dominion” over the earth’s creatures (Gen. 1:28). Just as Adam and Eve’s sin results in the “cursing” of the ground (Gen. 3:17-18), many environmental issues start with humanity’s failure to obey that ancient call to lovingly “work and keep” the land. During my recent internship with A Rocha USA, I’ve seen how human action has “cursed” the Indian River Lagoon in Florida, where seagrass withers and oyster reefs collapse, and where vulnerable species like the butterfly ray and horseshoe crab swim in polluted waters. I’ve also seen meadows clotted with invasive King Ranch bluestem, and Texan forests tarred with the shadows of invasive glossy privet. A massive glossy privet (Ligustrum lucidum) growing in the Stenis Tract of Austin, Texas. This species takes over Texan ecosystems and shades out native plants. As part of my habitat restoration work, I was tasked with killing these glossy privets, knowing all the while that this was a tree that God created good, and which God desired to “be fruitful and multiply” in its native habitat of East Asia. Now that humans have brought this species to the U.S., though, it’s strangled so many biotic communities. (You can read more about A Rocha USA’s work in Florida  and Texas  using the embedded StoryMap links.) The Israelite Land Ethic When we read further in the Torah, Eve and Adam’s responsibility to care for the soil becomes part of the covenant between God and the people of Israel. In Stewards of Eden , Sandra L. Richter explains that the Israelite land ethic “emerged from their understanding that Canaan was a land grant … If the nation will keep Yahweh’s commandments, they will keep the land” (Richter 15-16; cf. Deut. 5:31-33). Conversely, if Israel disobeyed God’s commands, the land would “vomit” them out (Lev. 18:26-28). That’s why it’s so significant that the ethical treatment of creatures and landscapes is woven into Israelite law. Among its commands are those to allow livestock to rest on the Sabbath (Deut. 5:13-14), to give the land itself a Sabbath year (Lev. 25:2-5), and to spare mother birds (Deut. 22:6-7). Richter interprets the latter to be an instance of pars pro toto , being just “one expression of a larger principle” that Israel should protect their ecosystem’s ability to sustain life (Richter 53). Though there are some human benefits to these laws (for instance, letting farmland lie fallow preserves its fertility), the adamant “good,” “good,” and “very good” of Genesis challenges us to consider that, to some degree, these laws exist due to God’s love for the animals and soils themselves. During an earlier conservation internship in 2018, I saw this biblical land ethic put into practice at the Brooksdale Environmental Centre , one of A Rocha Canada’s programs in British Columbia. Brooksdale is a tiny village of cream-and-cocoa-hued homes bordered by Douglas firs. While the Tatalu River flows through a wetland on one side, an organic farm burgeons on the other. The wetland is home to three-spined sticklebacks, frogs, and the endangered Salish sucker with its bronze glow, and the farm is home to all manner of vegetables. Carrots flourish their fronds, eggplants polish their violet glaze, jalapeños coil like gymnasts on the stalk, and the golden husks of squashes swell from the soil, echoing the ancient promises of a land flowing with honey. The organic farm of the Brooksdale Environmental Centre is in Surrey, British Columbia. By planting native maples and removing invasive sunfish, by leading children on hikes through the firs, by studying local birds, bats, and frogs, and by raising their crops in a way that nourishes the life of the soil, Brooksdale practices a philosophy that echoes the Bible: if we’re to live long in this land, we need to tend to it with compassion and prudence. The Salvation of the Cosmos To be fair, there are few Christians who would seriously suggest that God’s creation isn’t “good,” or that humans don’t have some obligation to care for it, or at least steward it wisely. The real hangup is the question of who Jesus came to save. Sure, he might have a liking for the lilies of the field, but his true mission is to save humans and take them to heaven, right? Paul’s epistles, however, call to question the idea that Jesus’ only goal is to save humanity. In Colossians, Paul describes Jesus not only as the force that sustains all that exists (Col. 1:16-17), but also as the means by which God “reconcile[s] to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). Though theologians debate about the exact meaning of “all things” in this context, the Greek term that Paul uses, ta panta , is usually all-encompassing, and the chapter’s earlier references to creation imply that Jesus’ act of reconciliation occurs on a cosmic scale. Elsewhere, Paul describes the reconciliation of “all things” in heaven and earth as part of Christ’s preordained salvific plan (Eph. 1:7-10). He also teaches that all of creation is “groaning” in anticipation of divine rescue, and that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-23). The same passage makes a distinction between Paul’s human audience and the groaning “creation” (Rom. 8:23), so it seems unlikely that “creation” (or ktisis , in Greek) refers to the broken creatureliness of humanity. The more likely interpretation is that this is Paul’s response to the “cursed ground” of Genesis 3:17—that someday, the sufferings that humans have inflicted on God’s world will come to an end. Such a cosmic view of salvation is startling. The famed theologian John Wesley was so inspired by this passage from Romans that he exclaimed, “Nothing is more sure, than that as ‘the Lord is loving to every man,’ so ‘his mercy is over all his works;’ all that have sense, all that are capable of pleasure or pain, of happiness or misery” (Wesley, “ The General Deliverance ”). Indeed, if Paul is really saying that all that exists will be liberated and reconciled to God, then Christ’s mission is to rescue all that breathes. What would this liberated creation look like? When our present ecosystems are filled with agony and death—when they require death, in fact, to keep functioning—it’s hard to imagine what kind of changes would enable all species to coexist without suffering. Debra Rienstra, in her book Refugia Faith , responds to this question by asserting, “There be plenty of dragons beyond the edges of our theological and scriptural maps” (Rienstra 173). I can’t help but agree: whatever it means for God to “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5), it’s beyond our imagination. As mysterious as these promises may be, they do hint that Jesus’ kingdom—once it arrives in fullness—will look less like clouds and winged ghosts, and more like a community of healed creatures in restored landscapes. It may look like the cerulean swathes of bluebonnets that A Rocha restored in Central Texas. It may look like an Indian River Lagoon rife with oyster-beds, swarming with horseshoe crabs, and lush with seagrass. It may look like the hardy soils of Brooksdale, which don’t wash away in the rain, but overflow with squash, celeriac, kale, and aubergine. It may even look like a small tuxedo cat, bobbing her tail to the tune of the old hymn: “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found…” This is Christ's vision for the universe, and this is the work that we—as members of Christ's body—are called to enter into, nurturing and restoring all creatures. The Stenis Tract of Austin, Texas, overrun with invasive King Ranch bluestem. The Stenis Tract, 11 months after A Rocha’s invasives removal and wildflower planting. Noah Guthrie works as the Nashville Conservation Coordinator for A Rocha USA, supporting their communications team and bolstering their new Churches of Restoration program. The latter project empowers Nashville congregations to advocate for local and global ecosystems, both within their churches and in the broader community. For any who feel led to support Noah in his role, you can find his fundraising page at arocha.us/guthrie . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Jen Rose Yokel Every piece of art holds a piece of the artist. We bring our whole selves to the creation of it, laboring, pondering, and curating before offering it to an audience. At best, our creations can become sacred ground—deeply personal and meaningfully connective because they have something true to say. The audience’s job is to bear witness and possibly let themselves be changed. So maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to finally get words around Interloper , Zane Vickery’s new full-length album. Music that sticks with me the most has always been born of honest wrestling. With soul-deep songwriting and a massive sound, this 77-minute epic does just that. It’s a furious, tender exploration of what it means to brush up against death and live to pick up the pieces.  In October 2022, Vickery suffered a head-on car crash that left the other driver dead and left him with months of physical, mental, and spiritual healing ahead. Not every song is about that event, but it serves as a throughline for all the questions about suffering, and it sets the stage for the spiritual unraveling that can accompany trauma. As the early single “Whatever Light We Have” lands on an ominous image—“I think I see headlights on my side of the road”—the personal reckoning begins. ( Listen to Matt Conner talk with Zane about this very song on the Rabbit Room’s Deepest Cut podcast. ) This is an album of dualities. Hope and forgiveness push back against despair and rage. Some of the album’s standout moments can be the most brutal to listen to. I am struck every time, by the rawness of “The Grateful and Grieving,” as he imagines the final hours of the driver who died in the accident. It’s a hard look at the aftermath of a miracle, when the suffering of recovery and survivor’s guilt becomes almost too great to bear, knowing you are “living to die again.” It’s about the acceptance that comes in the end and asking, “What will I do with the time I’ve been given?”  Then there’s “Honest,” a song that exposes and exorcizes the wounds left in a broken father/son relationship. “Not even a phone call and I very nearly died/I can’t let you go, I’ve tried.” Even more striking is the empathy woven into these songs, where would-be villains are imagined as broken humans with their own traumas. Forgiveness is an antidote to rage—for the driver, for his father, even for himself. It’s not all darkness though. Ultimately, this is an album about healing, and the album’s hinge point comes in “The Weight.” Longtime listeners will recognize this as a reworked version of Breezewood’s  opener, “Weighted,” but in light of the surrounding songs, these lines take on a whole new depth of meaning: Give me hope, round a corner or behind some door/Oh, I’ve been so disappointed before…is my grief something to comprehend?I’m sick of making mistakes, look me in the eye and make me sure/That it’s all worth the weight.   And still, even when it gets heavy, this album is musically such a fun listen, especially if you have a soft spot for late 90s and 2000s rock (like me). Once the second half gets going, it’s riffs in “YDWMA” and heavy post-hardcore in “Big Things Coming,” and even a playful 80s pop vibe to the heartfelt love song “Hydrangea” (complete with sax solo).  Thoughtfully produced throwback sounds lend an extra measure of joy to such heavy material. After all, sometimes the best thing we can do is turn up loud guitars and scream back at the darkness. There’s a lot more to say about Interloper . It’s one of those records that continues to deepen with every listen, and really is best experienced from start to finish, all at once. Come for the soaring choruses and nostalgic sounds. Stay to bear witness to suffering and healing, and perhaps find yourself and a little healing too. In more ways than one, it’s a gift this album exists in the world. You can stream Interloper wherever you listen to music. Also, don’t miss Matt Connor’s conversation with Zane Vickery on The Rabbit Room’s new podcast series, The Deepest Cut. Jen Rose Yokel is a poet, writer, and spiritual director. Her words have appeared at The Rabbit Room , She Reads Truth , and other publications, and she is the author of two poetry collections. She is also the co-founder of The Poetry Pub , an online community for poets. Originally from Central Florida, she now makes her home in Fall River, Massachusetts with her poet/professor husband Chris, their rescue dog, and an assortment of books and houseplants. Her latest book, Beneath the Flood , is available now from Bandersnatch Books. You can find her on Substack at Alongside Journal or on Instagram @jroseyokel .

by Anna A. Friedrich “...the artist must begin in love and create out of that…” - E. Lily Yu Don’t look for the Table of Contents when you pick up E. Lily Yu’s new book Break, Blow, Burn, & Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation because you will not find one. I read this book about a week ago, truth be told, in one sitting. Throughout that day, I realized how much I usually reference the Table of Contents in every book I read. Not in novels, of course, but (more) truth be told, I read considerably more non-fiction than fiction, and I have a habit (I’ll blame my dad for this one) of referencing the Contents again and again as I read to figure out where I am, where I’m going, and the general shape of the author’s intent.   I’m a poet and an Arts Pastor at a city church in Boston, and I try to read as much as I can in the realm of faith and art. I love the work I get to do, and I’ve been shaped by Annie Dillard, Mako Fujimura, Malcolm Guite, Mary Oliver, Jeremy Begbie, Anne Lamott, Andy Crouch, Madeleine L’Engle, Austin Kleon, Julia Cameron, David Taylor, Sarah Arthur—the list is long. In fact, I’m slowly, slowly attempting to write a creativity-unblocking book, myself, inspired by The Artist’s Way, but baptized. So when I see a new book appear on the scene, I am both elated and sheesh, to tell an embarrassing truth—I get a little sting in my chest imagining that this, THIS, is probably the book I want to write, should have written by now, and it’s likely to be way better than anything I’m capable of writing.  So, I ordered Yu’s book, texted some friends to say I finally found the book that I failed to write and waited for its arrival in the mail. When I got it in my hands, I was first struck by its beauty. Whitney J. Hicks did the jacket design, according to the back flap, and it’s inviting—the design is a simple organic twig of leaves interwoven with the title. The phrase connected to something in my mind, but I couldn’t quite place it. Yu eventually discloses that her title comes from Donne’s poem “Batter my heart three-person’d God”: Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. A poem that never fails to make me squirm. I’ve been a follower of this Three Person’d God since my earliest years, but I haven’t prayed this way yet. I am rather enjoying the knocking, breathing, shining, and seeking to mend—that’s as dramatic as I want the Holy Spirit to be in my life. Yu’s title is bold, and her book is bold.  E. Lily Yu has won some prestigious awards as a novelist, and this new book is her first foray into nonfiction. By reading every word of the Acknowledgments (another habit I think I got from my dad), I learned that she wrote this book after being encouraged to do so by her Substack subscribers. Imagine that! I’m glad they did, and we should all be thankful to the two paid subscribers she particularly mentions: Susan Gossman and Misha Stone. So the book is new, beautifully designed, has a bold and poetic title, and she’s apparently a good writer (on Substack, no less!) . Now you are in the exact same place I was when I cracked it open.  The journey inside the pages is a delight—fresh, clear, energizing, convicting, practical, and winsome. It’s made up of three equal parts (a nod to Donne?), accompanied by three simple drawings that begin with a leaf, advance to a branch, and culminate in a full-leafed tree.  The first section is a diagnosis and an invitation. Her diagnosis is literary, cultural, and religious. She grieves the unmet hunger that is so present in many peoples’ souls—whether they’re scrolling social media, reading a new novel or a book review, or listening to a sermon at church—a hunger that she claims is rarely addressed, let alone satisfied with true bread.  She doesn’t exceed the limits of her expertise by attempting to comment on every single sphere of life, or diagnosing worldwide problems. Rather, she mostly writes about this hunger, as she senses it, in the literary world, while still making reasonable connections with our broader society and with the Christian church in particular. She explicitly names this hunger in herself as the very reason she wrote the book. What is this hunger?  Your imagination probably needs a good bath before you can hear the answer to that, and her first few pages offer it, but I’ll tell you anyway since this is a book review. The thing we are all hungering for is Love. But before you start imagining pink hearts, hand-in-hand walks on the beach, candlelit dinner, or whatever, let this wash over you: Yu writes: By love I mean what Erich Fromm meant, a practice and discipline of giving of one’s own aliveness to another … I mean generous and disinterested agape rather than passionate eros or fond philia. I mean the love that created the universe, that brings order to chaos and meaning to suffering and causes growth in its proper time. (pg. 8) “Giving of one’s own aliveness”—while of course, this is the way we’re meant to live as followers of Jesus (the ultimate giver of His aliveness), Yu is writing about the craft of writing. This kind of love needs to be the flame that ignites our writing. It’s the kind of writing she says is now terribly hard to find, the kind that she herself attempts to write, and the kind of writers she invites her readers to become. More than once, my eyes swam with tears, and as I put my finger in the book to keep my place, I folded it shut and quietly prayed, “Yes, Lord, let my own writing be fueled by this Love. Let me give of my aliveness in my poems.”  She writes of bread, and she writes of fire. “To inspire human beings with grace, love, and wisdom—to plant a pale spark in another person’s spirit, and breathe upon it, that the soul might quicken to flame—this is and has always been the unspoken, unwritten duty of writers, artists, and God.” (pg. 18) The first section ends with a long and wonderfully winding chapter titled “Reading Badly, Reading Well,” where Yu offers an invitation into the kind of reading (and therefore living) that joins mature love to wisdom. The way she addressed the work of the Reader was especially fresh to me. The whole second part of the book is devoted to the craft of writing, but she begins with all kinds of charges to Readers, and I am taking each one to heart.  Part two is a breakdown of writer’s craft, from understanding the writing life as a vocation to the call for courage and solitude, and much more. I won’t pretend to be your Table of Contents here; you’ll have to read it to uncover what comes before and after such a sentence as, “The artist dies to self, burns, and becomes transparent not out of self-hatred but out of love, so that something greater than the self might come into being.” (pg. 86) Yu says the most about being a Christian who is a writer in part three. From my perspective, this book is surprisingly hospitable to Christians and non-Christians. The way she interacts with novels and with our cultural moment is compelling no matter your faith, and yet, for a long-time Christian like myself, her way of naming and prodding me towards obedience was clarifying and convicting.  Her heroes and heroines are summoned, George MacDonald perhaps most of all. She offers up ways to pray before creative work, and she devotes a chapter to getting outside. Literally. She doesn’t resort to “touch grass,” but God bless her for writing this much-needed reminder, “If we returned our attention to nature, we would realize that life can never be unvarying happiness under a cloudless sky. It is instead a sifting of sediments, a cracking open, a melting, a solidifying, a structuring.” (pg. 205) This book has no Table of Contents, and it reads like a novel in some ways—when you begin, you must submit to the story, entrust yourself to the author’s leading, and the rewards are manifold. She ends the book with a hopeful image from a George MacDonald story, urging writers and readers in a way that I can only call pastoral: “To live as if this story is true, despite our doubts, in spite of the active and encircling darkness and the falsity and cruelty in the world—to believe that every human being is beloved of the Creator, and formed to do a beautiful work that no one else can do, if only she will let that love transform her utterly and set her hands to the task is to fly through darkness toward a flame.” (pg. 216) May it be so. Oh, and I’m still planning to write my book. Anna A. Friedrich is a poet and Arts Pastor in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find more of her work at annaafriedrich.substack.com If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

“You’re welcome.” “I’M WELCOME? For—for—for what?” “You were an okay chef when you started with me. And you left an excellent chef. So, you’re welcome.” “You gave me ulcers, and panic attacks. And nightmares. You know that, right? You understand that?” “Yeah. I gave you confidence, and leadership, and ability … You wanted to be great. You wanted to be excellent … You concentrated, and you got focused, and you got great. You got excellent.” This dialogue is an excerpt from a Season Three episode of The Bear, between chefs Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his former mentor/tormentor David Fields (Joel McHale). This brief encounter doesn’t end with reconciliation and there is no clear resolution. It’s one of the most unsatisfying scenes in the series. In allowing it to be so, I believe The Bear  gives us a uniquely realistic approach to our own trauma and how God repurposes it in ways that often leave us with more questions than answers.  The critically acclaimed FX/Hulu show centers around Carmy as he learns to process his mental state in the aftermath of his older brother’s suicide. His older brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), was the owner-proprietor of The Original Beef of Chicagoland. The restaurant was a sloppy over-the-counter establishment specializing in Italian hot beef sandwiches, served with an even sloppier side of customer service. The employees are crass and undisciplined and their customers loved it. The Original Beef was a beloved staple of the community even as it was poorly managed to the brink of closure. Carmy, a rising star in the culinary world, comes home to Chicago to manage the restaurant, and its rag-tag crew, after Mikey’s death. In the first two seasons, he partners with a chef de cuisine, Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and together they transform The Original Beef into a fine-dining establishment called The Bear. His employees undergo a massive transformation of their own. They learn communication skills, coping methods, and lean into the craft of their work. Their progression in the midst of their own personal dysfunctions is a highlight of the show—and one of the main reasons the second season has been nominated for a record 23 Emmys. They all progress and grow—except Carmy. He’s stuck in old patterns and well-worn paths that have habitually led to depression, doubt, and self-sabotage.  The duality between the restaurant’s outward-facing front-of-house service and the chaos behind the scenes in the kitchen runs parallel to the truncated compartmentalization that exists in Carmy’s own life. To the public, he is the owner of a successful restaurant. He’s one of the brightest new talents in the country. Yet his inner life is a discombobulated mess. He combats his panic attacks by chain-smoking cigarettes and torpedoes any and all meaningful relationships before they can blossom into real joy.  Through three seasons, we discover that much of his inner chaos is caffeinated into overdrive by a traumatic relationship he had with the aforementioned David Fields—whose method of training was based on intense fear and degradation which, according to Fields, produced the desired result.  As I watched their conversation play out—Fields wearing a smug demeanor that was equal parts sociopathic and sadistic—I was transplanted to my own experience as a young Korean American pastor, working as a subordinate under people who might have had the same approach as Fields when it came to training their underlings.  In many ways, Korean immigrant theology is akin to a theology of suffering. The older generations believe, whether they admit it or not, that any pastor worth their salt must endure suffering. If they haven’t, then suffering must be manufactured. Not unlike the ascetic Desert Fathers, Korean pastors and elders are renowned for their ability to withstand turmoil and hardships, some of it self-inflicted. There is a Korean word, cham-uh , which roughly translates to “suppress, bite your tongue, to endure and bear, ” and it might as well be the unofficial slogan of our orthopraxy. I wrote about this superhuman ability  to endure, especially focusing on its beauty and its necessity for survival—as cham-uh  has helped three consecutive generations of Koreans endure and thrive in the midst of extreme persecution, slavery, and war. But The Bear  has prompted me to revisit some of my unsavory experiences as a Korean American pastor.  My first pastoral experience was wrought with hardships for which my only path was to cham-uh . It was a difficult ministry for me and my wife. More than the physical toil it took on my body, it was the mental and emotional burden that was overwhelming. Without getting into specifics, the ministry expectations for me as an assistant pastor were to run a marathon as if it were a sprint. I wrestle with this scene from The Bear , specifically Fields’ justification of his treatment of Carmy. “You were an okay chef when you started with me. And you left an excellent chef. So, you’re welcome.” I left my first ministry dejected, feeling like I’d failed, and worse yet, feeling unsure of my calling because I’d abandoned my cultural orthopraxy. But I’m also certain it has shaped me into a better pastor. The overarching question I keep asking myself now is, “Was Fields right?”  I loathe this question because I fear it might be true. I believe I’m functionally  a better leader and pastor because of my trauma, not in spite of it. At least when it comes to the front of the house. My spiritual food service is in order. I am prepared for a wide assortment of workplace hazards. My congregation eats meals that have been forged in the fire and the public face of my restaurant projects health and vitality. And in the end, I keep going. I know I can endure. I can cham-uh  well past the point of exhaustion, even delirium. But it comes at an expense. The hidden and compartmentalized kitchen of my psyche is a jumbled mess. Chaos, doubt, self-sabotage. I go weeks at a time where I do not sleep more than three hours a night but then crash in bed for the next few days. I overeat one night, then have panic attacks the next. I bite off skin from the ends of my fingers on one hand, while grabbing bandages for the impending blood with the other.  Like Carmy, my issues go well beyond a previous working environment. But also like Carmy, it has been caffeinated into overdrive because of it. So as I finished watching this latest season of The Bear , it’s unclear which aspects of my training were vital for my pastoral growth and which have been unnecessarily damaging. The show offers no simple conclusions. Perhaps it will be addressed in Season Four but my guess is that the two are inseparable. Trauma and triumph. There is no clear delineation. It’s a bittersweet pairing that attracts as it repulses—like a home-cooked meal that reminds someone of their childhood years spent in an orphanage.  In the meantime, we are given a bit of gospel reprieve in the form of another dialogue from the same episode. In this scene, Chef Luca (Will Poulter) and Chef Sydney are sitting around a table at a dinner party, eating a dish with peas in it. Luca looks at the dish. It’s one that he made a thousand times as an apprentice. After the first few bites, he tells Sydney, “I shucked, probably, ten million of these peas. Day in, day out, like robots.” “It’s kind of like a trauma-dish then?” “Yeah. Big time trauma-dish. The messed up thing is I currently make a dessert version [at my own restaurant]. Sweet pea panna cotta.” “You, kind of, repurposed your trauma then.” “That’s all we can do, right?” There is an unassuming dollop of biblical wisdom in those scripted words. The psalmist writes of God turning “wailing into dancing”   (Psalm 30:11) and I see it play out in real life in the processes that constitute a repurposing. I imagine Chef Luca in his test kitchen, shucking peas while conceptualizing a new dish. Poking and prodding, tweaking and testing. Exploring flavors and evaluating how they sit on the palette. Eventually, after many test runs, the dish comes out as he likes it, and it is in this entire process—from conceptualizing to plating—that he finds a bit of reprieve. Sweet pea panna cotta for the soul.  If we allow ourselves to be attuned to it, our Creator God gives us opportunities to go through a similar process while engaging in a variety of activities—art, music, writing, therapy, counsel, meditation, and prayer. We poke and prod. We revisit our pain. We allow ideas to fester and ferment. We explore a variety of word pairings, brush strokes, and harmonies. We test flavor combinations as they sit on the palette of our hearts. And somewhere along the way, God gives us increasing moments of respite. Wailing is transformed into dancing—or at least a slight rhythmic shuffling of our feet. Perhaps a clap or two.  Personally, the process of writing this piece has been like starting a new restaurant. I’ve been envisioning it as an open-kitchen concept. The intent of this space is to seek equal transparency between the back-of-the-house and the front. This restaurant undergoes construction with the hopes that opening up the kitchen will not only help me in my own repurposing, but to invite others to see how the dish gets made. And maybe somewhere throughout this entire process, we might find reprieve. A repurposing of cham-uh . Maybe that’s all we can do. Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at  Home of Christ in Cupertino . In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing media reviews for Think Christian. You can find more of his work  here . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Carolyn Arends As a musician, I know that arrangements matter. I remember reading an interview with the guitarist from the Canadian group Blue Rodeo in which he explained that the band’s signature song, “Try,” had once been a lackluster rocker. Their record company had passed on the song, but the band experimented with the tempo. When they slowed “Try” down, it became a soulful ballad—and an obvious hit. The right arrangement made all the difference. Every musician learns (sometimes the hard way) that making good choices about which notes are played—and how loud and long they are played—is the difference between cacophony and harmony. It’s not just in music that arrangements matter. Event planners, travel agents, florists, and funeral directors will all tell you that making good arrangements is their stock-in-trade. I wonder, what might it take to have a well-arranged life? I’ve been asking that question intermittently, but with increasing urgency since I came across author Dallas Willard’s definition of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in The Spirit of the Disciplines : “The disciple is one who, intent upon becoming Christlike . . . systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end.” I am interested in becoming more like Christ. I suspect that such a transformation might be the only way to make music out of the cacophony of my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. But how do I “systematically and progressively rearrange my affairs” to that end? An Invitation to the Disciplines Years ago, on a long concert tour, I noticed that our bass player, Dave, was reading a book called Celebration of Discipline . I found the title irritating. Dave was already notoriously more self-disciplined than your average musician. He ate raw vegetables while the rest of us devoured pizza. He went for morning jogs as we slept. His tour bus bunk was always unnaturally tidy. So when I saw Dave reading Celebration of Discipline , I recoiled in a disgust fueled by self-recrimination. Of course Dave would “celebrate discipline.” He probably ironed his underwear. After Dave finished the book, he began gently insisting that I read it. When I finally acquiesced, I discovered that Richard Foster’s famous treatise on the classic spiritual disciplines had something to say not only to neat freaks like Dave but also to messes like me. “Willpower will never succeed in dealing with the deeply ingrained habits of sin,” I read in the introductory chapter. That rang true. There were small but insidious habits of my heart—petty pride, stubborn self-reliance, almost unconscious strains of selfishness—that seemed hopelessly entrenched. “The demand is for an inside job,” I read, “and only God can work from the inside.” In the Book of Romans, the apostle Paul refers to righteousness as a gift from God 35 times, emphasizing repeatedly that no one can achieve a justified and rightly ordered life on her own. Not What I Expected So far,  Celebration of Discipline  was reassuring. I shouldn’t expect my willpower to be sufficient. ( Amen .) I should understand that inner transformation is purely a gift of God. ( Amen, again .) But just when I was beginning to relax, Foster’s argument took an interesting turn: “We do not need to be hung on the horns of the dilemma of either human works or idleness. God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so he can transform us.” Reading those words, a picture came to my mind. I could see a pool at the bottom of a waterfall that I knew represented the blessings God has for me—peace, love, acceptance, wholeness, and the fullness of his presence. There was no fence around the water. I could jump in any time I wanted. But I was running distractedly around the shoreline—sweaty, parched, and complaining about my need for refreshment. It occurred to me that maybe the spiritual disciplines were simply ways I could wade into the pool and stand beneath the waterfall. If the disciplines could become habits that would help me rearrange my affairs to be more open and receptive to God, then, yes—they were worth celebrating. So I read Foster’s catalog of classic spiritual practices: meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. Some of them were strange and new; others were old friends.I found myself thinking about a season, back in high school, after my first serious boyfriend and I had broken up. My youth pastor’s wife, Pam, sent me a card, and at the bottom she wrote Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” There was little doubt about the desires of my heart, so I considered Psalm 37:4 a contract. All I had to do was delight in God, and he’d give me back my boyfriend. I wasn’t exactly sure what sort of “taking delight” in the Lord would meet my end of the bargain. So I picked up a copy of Our Daily Bread  in my church’s foyer and began reading it at breakfast and right before bed. Pam had also given me the devotional classic The Practice of the Presence of God , and I decided I’d try to be like the book’s author, a 17th-century monk named Brother Lawrence, by practicing God’s presence all day long. “I’m walking to my locker now,” I’d whisper to Jesus between classes. “I’m going to science class.” Two strange things happened. First, I started to genuinely delight in God—to look forward to our set-aside times together and to have a sense that he was with me throughout the day. Second, the more I delighted in God, the more the desires of my heart changed. After a while, I didn’t want my boyfriend back. God had literally given my heart new desires. An inner transformation had taken place, and I was learning to want the things God wanted for me. The disciplines I had almost inadvertently practiced in that season—prayer, study, meditation, guidance—had indeed been means of grace. Years later, sitting on a tour bus reading Celebration of Discipline , I began to remember that spiritual practices were meant to be not chores but invitations—opportunities to “progressively and systematically rearrange” the habits of my life in order to delight in God—and to increasingly learn how much God delights in me. A Well-Ordered Life When I get up tomorrow morning, there will be a moment when I choose whether to start my day with the disciplines of silence and prayer or whether I simply hit the ground running. Either way, God will still love me. He’ll still be near. Yet I know from experience that I am likely to encounter a day I begin with prayer much differently than a day I don’t. The events of a day initiated in my own strength seem to come at me frantically—as bullets to dodge in the hopes of surviving until dinner. When I begin the day in divine conversation, those events seem graced with potential and freighted with God’s involvement. The notes are the same, but the song has changed. The right arrangement makes all the difference. Revisiting Celebration I’ve been thinking about my first encounters with Celebration of Discipline lately because it is one of the books we’ll be reading this year in the Renovaré Book Club (alongside Worth Celebrating , a new book documenting the originals of Celebration of Discipline and the movement it sparked, The Narrow Way by Rich Villodas , and the devotional classic Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Pierre de Caussade.) We begin September 23rd, and we’d love to have you join us. You can learn more at renovare.org/bookclub – and Rabbit Room readers can use the code RABBITFIVE to get $5 off. Adapted from “Transforming Habits,” originally published in Christianity Today . Carolyn Arends is a Vancouver-based musician, author, speaker, and director of education for Renovaré, a far-reaching organization that resources and encourages spiritual renewal. Her passions include human creativity, spiritual formation, and the beautiful sport of hockey. Learn more about Carolyn at her website , more about Renovaré at renovare.org , and more about Carolyn's new video series with the Henri Nouwen Society (A Beautiful Adventure: The Gift of the Arts in Spiritual Formation) here .

by Matt Wheeler The Rabbit Room community is brimming with people of faith who have fascinating stories and who are doing generative, creative work. The subject of this conversation, North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Hope Newman Kemp, and the backstory that culminates in her new album Facing Eden  are compelling examples of this, and we’re pleased to spotlight her and this project. In this dialogue, you’ll be introduced to her long path to this redemptive work, the heart behind her jazz-infused style, and her encouragement to those seeking to craft an artist identity by the intense work in merging the two strong calls of creativity and domesticity. Matt Wheeler: I want to ask about your new album project, Facing Eden , but first, for context: what has your journey been like up to this point, and what role has music played? Hope Newman Kemp : I grew up making music in a home immersed in Jesus Folk culture during the soul-sonic 70’s. At 20, I married a cute non-musician future Army dentist, and children came right after–requiring every ounce of creative collateral I could muster.  I am a piano-driven songwriter, singer, and psalmist, so church worship service was a natural fit while also moving around the world and homeschooling.  In 1998 and 2005, I self-produced 2 CDs of original songs that were not great, some of them not even good, but the creative collaboration proved exhilarating. In 2007, I joined Elon University’s Recording Arts program for a live analog recording of Christmas music called “Unto Us.” Then, in 2017, I wrote and recorded “Hoping for Real: Songs Inspired by The Velveteen Rabbit” (produced by Ben Hardesty of The Last Bison), which we developed into a musical reading show.  During the pandemic, I contributed vocals as part of a quartet with UNC jazz studies professors for an album called “Carolina Bluebird Jazz Project.” What looked like productive artistry on paper felt more like a futile (and very expensive) jumping up and down in one spot.  Meanwhile, our family began expanding to include grandchildren and our home, an intergenerational hub. I told myself, “You can figure this out after the kids are grown!”; a vision I should not have adopted.   Because when that day arrived, I discovered “No Room for Older Women” the prevailing banner anywhere I sought to enter. After 35 years, I had mastered domesticity yet had not blazed trails for making music with other artists or ministries. One might say, “Ok, but now you have the good life: happy marriage, established home, a bit of artistic expression–so what’s the problem exactly?” The problem was a paralyzation in creative forward motion I did not expect.  As a final blow, church worship music began culturally shifting in ways I could not affect, which made it necessary to remove myself from that sphere. This disabled me completely. MW: Sounds like you were stymied—feeling the pull to use your giftings in music in God’s service, but not sure where to point them or where to start. Not sure where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”, as Frederick Buechner put it. How did that start to change? HNK : My stymied state was strangling immediate relationships: my marriage, my friendships, and my own inner life also began to suffer.  By divine intervention, I met renowned artist Babbie Mason, and she became my private songwriting coach for a year.  However, with her, I also learned I had been writing the kind of song meant for a Sunday morning church singer—a path I wholly did not want. Inadvertently, I was painting my own artistic output into a corner! In ridiculous irony, the Lord was giving songs, but I found it too painful to work them out. Then, a few years ago, I met Melanie Waldman at a songwriter’s workshop. She introduced me to The Rabbit Room and the Jesus-loving artists there.  The Lord also separately directed me to Stephen Roach (Makers and Mystics), Rachel Wilhem (United Adoration), and Michael Minkoff (Renew the Arts) as counselors.  Sitting in new, trusted company and learning of their artistic laments, was a reorientation that helped me repent of self-pity and see myself as an artist loved by God, created for good works–particularly while amid artistic desolation.  Even so, I was not making fast progress out of my whirlpool. This was my state when Jeremy Casella and I met.  MW: Jeremy Casella—who I understand produced your new album “Facing Eden.” How did that collaboration come together, and what did he have in mind for the project? HNK : At that point, I had grown so cynical about my artistic identity that I let Jeremy’s message sit for two solid months before replying. He stated that he felt impressed by the Holy Spirit to reach out.   He didn’t know, but that’s the part that caught my attention.  Eventually, I tossed two songs to him that didn’t fit inside the same collection in my mind, but Jeremy heard things he was excited about. He is well-respected, his Nashville relationships are stellar, and he wanted to share them with me. This resonated profoundly. Historically, I’ve had to pursue artistic collaborations—they don’t usually come my way. I finally accepted that this was an invitation from the Lord Jesus Himself via Jeremy Casella.   MW: And the project that emerged from this collaboration is called “Facing Eden.” What is the significance of that title? HNK :   One of my literary character heroes is “Sarah Smith of Golders Green” in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce .  The image I have of her is the one I want for myself: A woman so enamored with the God of Love that she walks face-forward into the barren place as if it is her road sign. She does not consult her fruitful footsteps for compass; rather attention is focused ahead on Love Himself.  Behind her flows the fantastical continuance of nature in seraphim, dancing nymphs, butterflies, waterfalls– as if enfolded in the train of her robes.  I adopted this elevation and commissioned Sarah Haddox (Sincerely Sarah Studios) to produce the portrait (cover art designed by Nicole Anosen, 28 Lions).  She visualizes the variety of song genres as strands of multi-colored hair, picturing what Jeremy has synergized: 11 different songs on one album—love songs, Gospel, jazz, bluesy folk, and a nod to my Jesus People roots (featuring Phil Keaggy, so he’s present in the roots AND fruits!)  The idea for the name, FACING EDEN, is two-fold: what happened there needs to be faced: we—the image bearers of the Creator—were once housed inside but now are exiled to the field. Even so, the misty outline of Eden is always present behind the person/the task/the work before us as the way to bring about that reunion of “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”   I’m in the youth of my old age. The window is Now. So, two songs evolved into three, then an EP, and then “Let’s finish this out into an album!”—something my cheerleading husband also said. In the end, I made this album for me. It is an added delight to share it with the world. MW: The lead single, “Keep on Going,” is especially upbeat and, well, hopeful. What is the story behind that song? HNK:  The phrase “Keep on Going” is a line Pete Peterson sent to me in response to a message.  The song was written while driving home from a Hutchmoot conference. I visualized myself standing on a cliff overlooking a vast cavern where another me was scrambling to find the secret door out of it. I called, “I see you! Keep on going!”   The song doesn’t follow a traditional songwriting structure. It moves along verse after verse after verse, drawing inspiration from the many good works in the lives of the people I had just met. Jeremy produced the song to resound its origin story: the chorus revs up to a near-chaotic constitution of voices and instruments while simply fading away (keeps on going). The other songs on the album were written during long prayer walks around our 100-acre property. MW: What advice would you give to a person in a similar season of life who is looking to venture into a new or renewed, creative pursuit?  HNK:  I get it. I get that the “recipes” don’t fit when you reach a certain stage in life. Reality is real.  But DON’T do as I did and sit ruminating: DO instead ask the Lord to help you find wise counselors to help you see what you might be missing. I’ve lived this contention long enough to have finally learned: The talent He has placed within you—along with the whole of your history—is purposed for His glory and your good. It is His investment as a ready means (for you first!) to enter His presence.  Can you accept its existence could be for no other reason than to keep you hidden in Him? His Spirit has whispered this question to me, releasing greater happiness for my primary work as Overseer of People and Place, like Sarah Smith of Golders Green. Like Jesus.  Your artist identity in Jesus is worth the fight it feels like it’s in. So: Ask Him for vision, then walk in the Light you've been given.   And keep on going! A troubadour, poet with a guitar, & stage banter-conversationalist, Matt Wheeler lives in Lancaster County, PA with his wife & teenage son. He specializes in songs based on classic works of literature - his 2021 album "Wonder of It All", featuring songs & stories based on books including "The Horse & His Boy" & "Watership Down" is an example. His new album, "A Hard History of Love" is inspired by a series of Wendell Berry's short stories & released in September 2023. You can read and listen to more of his work at  www.mattwheeleronline.com . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Carly Marlys 'Tis the season for Christmas in July around the Rabbit Room. All week, you'll be seeing festive posts and opportunities popping their heads out of the various nooks and crannies of ye ol' rabbit warren. In the spirit of the Christmas in July season, we present a Liturgy for the Good Work of Waiting by Douglas McKelvey. Also, stay updated on our Christmas in July calendar for more exciting activities and opportunities to engage with the Rabbit Room. Plus, don’t miss out on a $10/month Rabbit Room membership , available this week. *quarterly gifts not included As my life is lived in anticipation of the redemption of all things, so let my slow movement in this line be to my own heart a living parable and a teachable moment. Do not waste even my petty irritations, O Lord. Use them to expose my sin and selfishness and to reshape my vision and my desire into better, holier things. Decrease my unrighteous impatience, directed at circumstances and people. Increase instead my righteous longing for the moment of your return, when all creation will be liberated from every futility in which it now languishes. Be present in my waiting, O Lord, that I might also be present in it as a Christ-bearer to those before and behind me, who also wait. As I am a vessel, let me not be like a sodden paper cup full of steaming frustration, carelessly sloshing unpleasantness on those around me. Rather, let me be like a communion chalice, reflecting the silvered beauty of your light, brimming with an offered grace. Amen. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 1  from Rabbit Room Press . You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com . By Doug McKelvey CELEBRANT: To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war. PEOPLE: In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word. But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending. So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ, Let it be to us now a delight, and a glad foretaste of his eternal kingdom. Bless us, O Lord, in this feast. Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups, and over this table laden with good things, as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor, of aromas and savory spices, of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing, of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints. May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope. May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption. May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night, shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts, stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision on the kingdom of heaven that is to come, on the kingdom that is promised, on the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us, For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun. ALL PARTICIPANTS NOW LIFT THEIR GLASSES OR CUPS May this feast be an echo of that great Supper of the Lamb, a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God. Where two or more of us are gathered, O Lord, there you have promised to be. And here we are. And so, here are you. Take joy, O King, in this our feast. Take joy, O King! GLASSES ARE CLINKED WITH CELEBRATORY CHIME, AND PARTICIPANTS IN THE FEAST SAVOR A DRINK, ADMONISHING ONE ANOTHER HEARTILY WITH THESE SINCERE WORDS: Take joy! CELEBRANT: All will be well! PARTICIPANTS TAKE UP THE CRY: All will be well! Nothing good and right and true will be lost forever. All good things will be restored. Feast and be reminded! Take joy, little flock. Take joy! Let battle be joined! Let battle be joined! Now you who are loved by the Father, prepare your hearts and give yourself wholly to this celebration of joy, to the glad company of saints, to the comforting fellowship of the Spirit, and to the abiding presence of Christ who is seated among us both as our host and as our honored guest, and still yet as our conquering king. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take seat, take feast, take delight!

by Cindy Anderson My first-grade teacher taught us our lessons outside whenever possible. My fourth-grade teacher constantly did hands-on science experiments and read books to us. And my eighth-grade teacher read the words of William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Maya Angelou aloud to us. My school librarian introduced me to Wrinkle in Time , and to this day, Madeleine L’Engle is still one of my favorite writers. She also helped me track down the rest of the Narnia books after I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and showed me the shelves with Beverly Cleary, J.R.R. Tolkien, and L.M. Montgomery. How could I ever begin to thank someone for such introductions? Today’s book list celebrates the educators, librarians, and book enthusiasts in our lives: the people who point us to beauty, creativity, and great ideas. If you are an educator, librarian, bookshop owner, writer, illustrator, editor, or publisher of beautiful books, a parent or grandparent who reads to their children, or someone who supports local or small online bookstores, these books are about you.  Books by Horseback by Emma Carlson Berne During the Great Depression, Book Women braved the mountainous terrain of rural Kentucky to bring books to children and families. The Pack Horse Library initiative served over 300 libraries and more than 100,000 people. The lovely illustrations in this book enhance the story of what a day would have looked like for one of these librarians. (Recommended for ages 4-8) Planting Stories by Anika Aldamuy Denise This is an inspiring biography of Pure Belpre, a storyteller, librarian, and puppeteer who arrived in America in 1921, carrying the stories and folklore of her Puerto Rican homeland with her. After being hired by her neighborhood library as a bilingual assistant, she began planting the seeds of her stories and became a champion of bilingual literature. The illustrations are lovely, and the story is rhythmic, with Spanish words scattered throughout the pages.  (Recommended for ages 4-8) The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read by Rita L. Hubbard Mary Walker was born into slavery and always dreamed of freedom and learning to read. At the age of 15, she was given her freedom. At age 20, she was a wife and a mother. By age 68, she had worked several jobs, and at age 116, she learned how to read, write, add, and subtract. She was eventually certified as the oldest student in the United States.  (Recommended for ages 5-9) Madeline Finn and the Library Dog by Lisa Papp Madeline wants to be a better reader, but it’s not easy. Fortunately, she finds help when she meets Bonnie, the library dog. Madeline’s courage grows as Bonnie patiently listens to her read-aloud. This is an encouraging and sweet story for anyone who loves books (or dogs).  (Recommended for ages 3-8) Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen Miss Merriweather, the lead librarian, wants everyone to follow the rules, but what are the rules about a lion in the library? After learning some library etiquette, the lion eventually becomes a regular fixture, helping whenever possible. He dusts the shelves with his tail, becomes a comfortable backrest for the children in story hour, and becomes a dependable friend. The charming illustrations are a perfect match for this sweet story.  (Recommended for ages 3-7) Waiting for the Biblioburro by Monica Brown Ana and the other children in her village have little access to books. All that changes when Luis Soriano arrives with his traveling library resting on the backs of two burros. The text has Spanish words scattered throughout, and the illustrations match the story perfectly. This book is based on a true story and reminds its readers of the importance of reading and education.  (Recommended for ages 4-8) The Art of Miss Chew by Patricia Polacco Patricia Polacco is a brilliant picture book writer and illustrator. The Art of Miss Chew  is a heartwarming tribute to the teacher she credits with setting her on her course as an artist. As a child, Patricia struggled with reading, but with the help of some fantastic teachers, she grew as a reader, writer, and illustrator. Her books are ideal for slightly older children as they often cover difficult subjects and are lengthy for a picture book.  (Recommended for ages 5-10) The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds The gentle words of Vashti’s teacher give her the courage to express herself as an artist. Beginning with a simple dot on a blank page, she discovers her own creativity and finds confidence in her ability to express herself. Simple text and fun illustrations make this little book a sweet and encouraging story.  (Recommended for ages 3-7) We are in a Book by Mo Williams I have recommended the Elephant and Piggie series before, but since this title perfectly fits this category, I decided to mention it again. We Are in a Book  is a clever and funny story about what happens when Gerald and Piggie realize they are in a book and are being read. It is a great read-aloud story. (Recommended for ages 3-7) Just Read! by Lori Degman This vibrant and cheerfully illustrated picture book encourages young readers to read anywhere and everywhere. Full of creativity and imagination, this book is a delight for readers of all ages.  (Recommended for ages 4-8)

by Ruth Naomi Floyd "Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,   Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…" From Lift Every Voice and Sing  Lyrics by James Weldon Johnson   and Music composed by John Rosamond Johnson  My paternal great-grandmother, Hattie, lived to be 109 years old. Her husband, Thomas, my great-grandfather, lived to the age of 99. Thomas and Hattie were married for over 75 years. When we were children, my two sisters and I would spend one week at my great-grandparents’ home during the summer. Hattie kept a meticulously clean house and an incredible garden. She grew watermelon, collard greens, turnip greens, fruits, and herbs. She taught me to churn butter and ice cream, cook, “keep” house, and beautifully dress a table. One afternoon, I was running the sweeper in the living room. Hattie was in the kitchen, mopping the floor. As I was singing, I experimented with the low end of my voice, and suddenly, I heard the mop hit the floor. Hattie ran upstairs; it was the fastest I ever saw her run. Her daughter, my great Aunt Ella, who was in her eighties, went upstairs to check on Hattie. When Ella came downstairs, I asked her if Hattie was okay. Ella told me that Hattie felt something in my voice that reminded her of her mother’s singing voice. Hattie’s mother was an enslaved African in America.   The echo of Hattie’s mother’s voice dwelled within my voice. It saddened me that this echo startled  Hattie and made her lament. I could never know how she felt. When Hattie came downstairs, she smiled at me and gave me a slice of one of her amazing cakes. We sat silently at the kitchen table as I  ate my cake. My sisters were outside playing, so it was a special moment for us. I would like to believe that Hattie’s lament turned to joy. The soul of her mother’s singing voice continues to sound in her great-granddaughter’s voice. This gift of echoed sound is powerful, and I am deeply grateful.  The song Hattie heard me sing while running the sweeper was the great African American Spiritual Wade in the Water .  Refrain   Wade in the water   Wade in the water, children   Wade in the water  God's gonna trouble the water.  See that man all dressed in white,   God’s gonna trouble the water   The leader looks like the Israelite   God’s gonna trouble the water.  See that band all dressed in red,   God's gonna trouble the water  Looks like the band that Moses led   God's gonna trouble the water. If you don’t believe I’ve been redeemed,   God's gonna trouble the water   Just follow me down to Jordan’s stream   God's gonna trouble the water.      No more shall they in bondage toil,   God's gonna trouble the water   Let them come out with Egypt's spoil   God's gonna trouble the water.   I don’t know if Hattie’s mother sang Wade in the Water , but we sang it at Hattie’s church during  Sunday services. Wade in the Water is among the best-known and beloved African American Spirituals. The lyrics to Wade in the Water first appeared in the 1901 New Jubilee Songs as sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It was co-published by Frederick J. Work and his brother, John Wesley Jr., an educator at the historically black college Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.   African American Spirituals contain expressions for the fight for freedom, biblical stories and imagery, and messages about the daily life of enslaved Africans in America. The biblical themes in many African American Spirituals are evident. These themes inspired compositions like Didn’t My  Lord Deliver Daniel, Go Down Moses, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, Steal Away, Every Time I Feel the Spirit, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Crucifixion, and many more.  Like many African American Spirituals, Wade in the Water contains coded messages that were used as alerts and warnings to guide and assist the enslaved fugitives to freedom. The lyrics of the songs remain the same, but the message is sometimes determined by the meter of the music. When the enslaved Africans sang the meter mournfully slow, it represented the journey from life to death, from earth to heaven. When they sang the song up-tempo, it was a signal song for the escaping enslaved Africans to get in the water to avoid the slave catchers by losing the scent of the bloodhounds. Enslaved Africans were hunted across the country, and these alert songs helped them avoid recapture and reach freedom. Wade in the Water is one of the African American Spirituals from the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses, such as homes, barns, churches, and businesses. These places helped enslaved Africans escape the American South and reach free states and Canada.   To create is to protest all that is wrong in the world. The enslaved Africans composed and sang in resistance to the sin of American slavery. For the most part, enslaved people were not allowed to meet with two other enslaved people without white supervision, yet somehow, Black life was able to remain a secret to white America. The enslaved Africans would meet in the invisible church. The clandestine church was hidden in the bush harbors, the woods, and other secret places. There were no set dates, times, or appointments. Songs created by the enslaved Africans convened the invisible church. Although the invisible church was illegal, worship services provided much-needed relief from the white gaze. They also offered a place to engage and practice a theology rooted in Imago Dei, the truth that all humans were created in God's image.  In certain places in the American South, the African drum was considered a dangerous communication tool, so the enslaved Africans bravely played rhythmic patterns on their bodies and shared them with their voices to communicate messages. They could not openly say the things they desired and needed to communicate, but they certainly could sing them.  Hattie sang African American Spirituals, her mother sang them, her children sang them, her grandchildren sang them, and her great-grandchildren and their children's children continue to sing them. This shared musical tradition connects generations, reminding us of our history, faith,  strength, beauty, and resilience. The singing of the enslaved Africans rang out in resistance to the carnage, damage, sorrow, oppression, and horror of American slavery.   There was beauty amid the wreckage. There was beauty in Hattie's mother's voice, a voice that sang its way to freedom. This beauty echoes in my own voice and even in my daughter’s voice. There are gifts of beauty that rise from the ashes that surround this path we call life. We, too, can lift our voices in songs of lament, protest, resistance, hope, love, rage, joy, and, most certainly, worship. And, when it is time for us to wade in the water to the other side, we can sing our way to our promised and heavenly home.  Ruth Naomi Floyd is a vocalist, composer, flutist, educator, independent historical researcher, photographer, and justice worker.  Photograph: “Echo” © Ruth Naomi Floyd Images  To hear Ruth explore more of the history of African American Spirituals, watch her lecture during Housemoot , the web conference offering over 15 hours of new lectures, recipes, and artistic offerings that will launch the same weekend as Hutchmoot (October 10-13, 2024) and continue through December 1, 2024.

by Andy Patton A few years ago, I attended a conference on Christian hospitality and was shocked by things that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have surprised me. Being a male, I was part of a tiny minority at the conference. The lectures were full of good advice—practical, theoretical, and theological—but it was mostly limited to the domestic sphere. How clean does the house need to be? How can we use the material arrangements of the house to communicate welcome? How far should you stretch yourself toward hospitality amid a busy life? What is the optimal mix of strangers and friends at a gathering? How do you get the word out if you want to host more? What do you do with interpersonal tensions at a meeting? These are essential questions, and you won’t hear me slight or minimize them. [By the way, pick up Christine Pohl’s wonderful book   Making Room  if those important questions are also your questions.  It tackles those and more and is a great jumping-off point for further exploration into Christian hospitality.] However, I did have the terrible sense that all the answers offered that weekend had taken as a starting point too much of the consensus of modern Western individualism and materialism in which we all live and move and have our being. Into this strangely isolated, atomized, privatized, secularized, commodified condition, hospitality was offered as another religious pastime, a good deed in a list of characteristics of the pious life. Somehow, hospitality has been reduced to entertaining, but it should be so much more than that. The Way Things Look Is Still Important This isn’t to say candles and flowers on the table aren’t important. They are. When people come into our spaces, they should feel welcome. That welcome is communicated in a hundred different ways that show that their needs, interests, personalities, and personhood have been taken into account. That means you clean (if you can). You offer tea and coffee. You make eye contact and ask people questions. You listen. You observe. You react to what you notice. You do all the “kindergarten skills” that tell people, “You have my attention and my interest and I want you to be comfortable.” The word should be filled with large and grand meanings that go back to the very nature of what it means to be a human in God’s reality. The pursuit of hospitality must be a fundamental commitment for the Christian. Inside that commitment is a key that can unlock the shackles of materialistic assumptions that often keep the modern follower of Christ bound in a prison they can neither see nor feel. Hospitality is the Most Basic Human Calling The story of hospitality starts at the very beginning—in Genesis. On the first page of the Bible, God calls humanity to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” This doesn’t mean we are to dominate the earth or one another but to have dominion over creation like a good gardener, stewarding it toward fruitfulness. That is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, whose commitment to the people and things that he has made infinitely exceeds our own. This calling stands over all  places and all times that have been given to each person . What people feel, hear, and experience when they come into your places and step inside your time is an expression of this basic calling to embody the image of God. From there, the theme of hospitality runs straight through the Bible to the last page, when God opens the doors to his holy city and never shuts them again. Between Genesis and Revelation, the highest moments of the Bible's heroes are marked by their welcome to strangers, enemies, the weak, and the afflicted. Throughout the story, God consistently welcomes his wayward people back, founding and re-founding a place where they can live in peace and promising a time when he will finally set aside the troubles plaguing his creation once and for all. Jesus as the True Host However, the clearest example of the high-water mark of biblical hospitality is the life of Jesus. Some might say, “Wait. How could Jesus be hospitable? He didn’t have a home?” On one hand, I can sympathize with this objection. After all, though all things were created through Him, and for Him, Jesus was homeless. During the days of his ministry, the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. On the other hand, that objection is another case of the hospitality-as-entertaining model rearing its head since almost all of Jesus’ interactions with people can be described in terms of hospitality. If one looks at Jesus' life and doesn’t see hospitality reflected there, the problem isn’t with Jesus but with our notions of hospitality. Yes, Jesus fed people extravagantly on several occasions, but his hospitality wasn’t limited to food, drink, and a smile. Rather, all God’s work to conform his people to his likeness can be seen as hospitality. As Ben Keyes said in his wonderful lecture,   Image Bearers of a Hospitable God , “Holiness is something we are given when we receive the hospitality of God.” Jesus’ stories were full of characters enacting hospitality as a way of life. Think of the hero of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story designed to challenge and shock his hearers into silent reflection on the misbegotten thinking they had accepted as normal. Think of the parable of the Lost Sheep. The good shepherd leaves the herd (who are comfortable and safe) and goes out wandering for the lost one (who needs extraordinary love) and brings it home .  Think of the banquet host who wants his table to be full so deeply that he goes into the highways and the byways to bring everyone who will come. What does the father in the story of the Prodigal Son do when his wayward child comes home? He runs to his son, embraces, honors, and feasts with him. Think of the Unjust Steward. Or the Lost Coin. Or the Mustard Seed. Jesus’ stories are glimpses into the world he was trying to create. Not only did his stories point toward the reality of profound hospitality, but his presence also did. Around Jesus, bodies were made whole, the thinking of his hearers was untwisted, the storming creation was calmed, demons fled, and even death obediently ran backward. To be near Jesus was to see the world being made new. It is as if his presence was a beachhead of the kingdom of God, and all his words and actions made that Other Kingdom radiate out from himself, pushing back the effects of the fall and making all sad things come untrue. Finally, the host had come and was putting the house in order. At times, his hospitality even involved force. Mark tells us that, moments before he gave the rich young ruler a seemingly impossible task, “he looked at him and loved him.” Jesus knew the young man would walk away when faced with selling all his possessions. That is why he said it. Jesus put the man to a decision that cut all his self-aggrandizing daydreams of righteousness to ribbons. It was a very welcoming thing to do. Christ’s love has steel in it. Hospitality is Openness to the Intrusions of Love Just as hospitality isn’t entertaining, it isn't even always hosting. Hospitality is the readiness to welcome the intrusions and interruptions that love demands. That kind of love is profligate with time. It gives away time as though it were a precious resource that one has in such abundance that it has become common.  There is even a sense that an open-handedness to interruptions is the enactment of openness to God himself. We all have plans for our moments, and our days and interruptions cut across them, altering those plans or sometimes scattering them across the floor like blocks from a tumbled tower. Some of those interruptions are important. Some of them are ordained by God. So, hospitality to interruptions can be seen as an opportunity to join the Lord in something unforeseen.  Those practicing such hospitality can learn to cultivate an attitude that says, “Lord, I do not know what you have for me today, but I am your creature. My time is not my own, and I want to be open to what you will show me.” Those gifted in this aspect of love can offer those around them the sense that they are wholly present, that their conversation partners are utterly valued, and are the only object of their attention while their time together lasts.  Hospitality Isn’t an Optional Add-on for the Kingdom of God Just as in the life of Jesus, hospitality happens wherever you happen to be. It happens on the street, in the office, at stoplights, and at AA meetings. It isn’t limited to the walls of a house and a date on the calendar. You extend it to your kids at bedtime and to your spouse during a moment of clarity in the midst of a nasty fight. It happens when you barbecue in your front yard instead of your backyard so that you can say hello to people who walk by simply because that is what it means to be a city on a hill and salt to a needy world. Because of this, hospitality isn’t an optional add-on for the kingdom of God. It isn’t just for those with a flare for cooking. You do not need a bigger house to do more of it. It isn’t women’s work. It isn’t a lifestyle accessory to take up when you have it all together. It isn’t an outreach program. It isn’t just a small piece of a pious Christian life. Hospitality is the yeast that permeates the whole.  So next time you read 1 Peter and come across the command to “show hospitality to one another without grumbling,” try to stretch your imagination of what that could look like beyond inviting your friends over for another get-together. Better yet, interpret it in light of the vast and boundless verse immediately preceding it: “Love one another earnestly, for love covers a multitude of sins.” Andy Patton is the creator of the Darkling Psalter , a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms paired with new poems. He writes about biblical theology at Pattern Bible and co-edits a newsletter of cultural resources at Three Things . He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He works for the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member at L'Abri Fellowship in England. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. 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by Matt Wheeler A generation before Wendell Berry, there lived a man who loved the land. Not only the ground, the soil, the terrain—the entirety of the living creatures that called it home. To him, working toward a harmonious balance among these and the people who dwelt there was the best way to steward the gift of life. He saw humankind as important members of this community, but not its only members. That man: Aldo Leopold. An Iowa native born in the late 19th century, Aldo Leopold was a Yale-educated naturalist, forester, and professor who, in the late 1940s, served as an advisor on conservation for the United Nations. In 1935, he and his family bought and restored a worn-out farm in one of Wisconsin’s “sand counties”, a region shaped by a former glacial lake and with notoriously poor soil. The winsome prose in Leopold’s seminal work, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There,  shows this genuine affection. What comes through is an author with a sense of wonder at the mundane details, inspiring the same in readers.  The result reads like journal entries by a trusted mentor. Leopold’s work evokes the Rich Mullins proclamation that “ there’s so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see, but everywhere I go, I’m looking. ” The book has become a foundational text in conservation thought, though a reader need not identify as an avid conservationist to appreciate the book—this is simply great literature. Leopold provides readers ample evidence to grasp for the “why” of nature conversation before introducing them to the “what” and the “how”.  The author has a knack for impactful and direct statements. To wit, read his opening words in the foreword, to set up this work: “ There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. ” After he explains the structure of the book, he gives his thesis: “ That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. These essays attempt to weld these three concepts. ” The first section, “A Sand County Almanac,” is a series of short essays organized by month, a January-through-December chronicle of one year at the farm. Leopold kicks off “January Thaw” with these words: “ Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter. The hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world, dragging his belly in the snow. His track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year. ” Leopold is a noticer, and he invites his readers to join him in his noticing. He plays out in his mind what has transpired based on the tracks he sees in the snow—the tunnelings of a meadow mouse, the sweeping of the wings of an owl on the hunt, the lumberings of the skunk. The singular February entry, “Good Oak,” is my personal favorite passage in the book, and the portion I would give to a potential reader. The author starts off by suggesting that we should remember that, as food at its origin doesn’t come from a grocery store, neither does heat from a furnace. His prescription: that the reader should do as he has done and “ should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. ” Leopold tells of the origin of the aforementioned wood, from a lightning-struck tree that dates back to the end of The Civil War. What follows is a discourse on par with Robert Farrar Capon's ode to the noble onion in his masterwork, The Supper of the Lamb . As “ fragrant little chips spewed from the saw cut, and accumulated in the snow before each kneeling sawyer, ” a memoir of the tree itself and the history of the land around it unfolded, backward through time as the team cuts through, like in 1874, when “ the first factory made barbed wire was stapled to oak trees; I hope no such artifacts are buried in the oak and under saw! ” The fullness of the poetry and history woven together in these eleven pages defy easy summary, as Capon’s “onion” piece also does—it must be experienced for oneself. Later, the early-rising Leopold tells us of his habit of arriving early to behold the birds’ dawn chorus: “ At 3:30 am, with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook. I seat myself on a bench, facing the white wake of the morning star. I set the pot beside me. I extract a cup from my shirt front, hoping none will notice its informal mode of transport. I get out my watch, pour coffee, and lay notebook on knee. This is the cue for the proclamation to begin. ” In a short vignette titled “Draba”, we take a careful look at a small and little-noticed flower, among the smallest that bloom, often missed by all but those who kneel in the mud - and there find it in abundance. He writes,  " Some botanist once gave it a Latin name, and then forgot it. Altogether, it is of no importance - just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well. " Leopold waxes poetic about the migration of the “ feathered navies ” of geese; the theatrical and, in season, daily “ sky dance ” of the woodcock; the extraordinary chickadee with #65290 emblazoned on his band and the winters he weathered; and his love of pine trees—of which his family planted over 3,000 a year, according to The Aldo Leopold Foundation—among much else. The almanac section is heartfelt, intriguing, and simply beautiful.  The second portion, “Sketches Here and There”, contains portraits of Leopold’s travels across North America, spread over forty years. This rich and varied section features reflections ripe with wit and wonder. For this section, I think it best to highlight a few outstanding points in Leopold’s own words: On the short-sightedness we as humans often exhibit: “ He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea…We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness…Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. ” On recalling a trek in his young adulthood, when he and his brother explored a Mexican river delta wilderness by canoe: “ For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea. ‘He leadeth me by still waters’ was to us only a phrase in a book until we had nosed our canoe through the green lagoons. If David had not written the psalm, we should have felt constrained to write our own. ” And Leopold showing his cards as plainly as at any point in the book, following up a statement about how humankind tends to harshly handle the gift of wilderness: “ Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on a map? ” Aldo Leopold lands the book with “The Upshot.” Professor Leopold has taken us on a long series of field trips, taught us to appreciate what we have seen, and is now bringing it home. Here he outlines his “ land ethic, ” his core philosophy as a naturalist: “ A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state…it implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” The best teacher is often a person who loves what he or she does and who teaches by giving others a window to see that. Aldo Leopold loved the land and saw the wonder of it, and he had a gift for inspiring others to do the same. In this book, we are welcomed into, as Wendell Berry put it, “ the peace of wild things ” and are invited to appreciate, protect, and, in an exhortation much-needed in our increasingly technology-driven world, to get out and enjoy the good earth around us. A troubadour, poet with a guitar, & stage banter-conversationalist, Matt Wheeler lives in Lancaster County, PA with his wife & teenage son. He specializes in songs based on classic works of literature - his 2021 album "Wonder of It All", featuring songs & stories based on books including "The Horse & His Boy" & "Watership Down" is an example. His new album, "A Hard History of Love" is based on Wendell Berry's short stories. You can read and listen to more of his work at www.mattwheeleronline.com . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. 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by Stefanie Peters When asked what it looks like to be an editor at the nonprofit publisher Library of America , I often say two things: first, that my job is as much research as it is editing, and second (with tongue in cheek), that most of the writers I edit are dead. There have been a handful of exceptions to this, one of whom is Wendell Berry. I’ve had the joy and honor of publishing two books with Wendell so far: Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II , which was published in 2018, and Port William Novels & Stories: The Postwar Years , which will be published on July 16 ahead of Berry’s 90th birthday in August. Library of America’s mission is to champion the best of American writing by publishing definitive, authoritative editions. Our authors include the most influential and essential writers from all periods and genres, and we publish them in heirloom-quality hardcover editions. Maybe you’ll recognize our black jackets, with the author’s name in calligraphy above a red, white, and blue stripe. What do we mean by authoritative editions? Answering this question normally requires a good bit of textual research. For example, I recently edited a collection of William Faulkner’s short stories. Most of the stories were first published in magazines, and Faulkner’s original texts were edited either for a particular magazine’s house style or to shorten descriptive passages and remove sexually explicit material and obscenities. Sometimes an inattentive copyeditor introduced errors as well. Faulkner then published almost all his short stories in book collections, where he retained more editorial control. He often revised the stories for these collections. Even then, the books’ copyeditors were not always consistent with Faulkner’s preferences for spellings and punctuation. So I worked with the Faulkner scholar Theresa Towner to make sure that the texts we published in the Library of America editions were as close as possible to what Faulkner would have intended, correcting errors, obvious mistakes, and inconsistencies, sometimes with reference to Faulkner’s original typescripts, where they still exist. Authoritative texts are a way to honor the author’s intentions, and also to ensure that readers have access to the best version of a book available. James L. W. West III, the Fitzgerald scholar who edited The Great Gatsby for Library of America, said  that the work of creating an authoritative text “can be likened to the stabilization, cleaning, and restoration of a work of art that has deteriorated over time.” With a living author like Wendell Berry, the question of an authoritative text becomes a bit easier. We publish the version of the text that Wendell wants us to. But there still is a process to get there. So to describe what I do in editing Wendell’s fiction, I want to back up because I am the last and least of the membership of Berry’s editors. Wendell’s first reader and first editor, and the most important, is his wife, Tanya. Wendell famously doesn’t own a computer and writes his first drafts by hand, which he reads aloud to Tanya and then revises based on her initial feedback. Tanya then types the handwritten pages and makes further edits as she does so, marking her edits with checkmarks in the margins. Wendell has said  that knowing he will read his first drafts aloud to her is intimidating and that he is always trying to impress her: “I haven’t worked alone in any sense. I’ve been by myself a lot, but I haven’t been alone. I’ve been accompanied by her, and I think our companionship has left me very willing to accept the companionship and criticism of other people.” After the first few drafts with Tanya’s editing, Wendell’s drafts go to friends for critique, and then they go to Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press, who has been the editor and publisher of Wendell’s work for over fifty years now. Jack, whom I work with to create the Library of America editions of Wendell’s work, gets a xerox of the typescript draft in the mail, and his edits and Wendell’s revisions are sent back and forth in hardcopy and are also discussed on the phone. It’s a process that takes time—editing Wendell’s recent book The Need to be Whole took them over five years—but, Jack says , “it still provides what Wendell wants in this slow process of things: time to think. Time to reflect.” The editing process doesn’t always end when the book is published. When Wendell’s first three novels were reissued by North Point and Counterpoint, Wendell took the opportunity to revise. In Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), Port William was never named, and the original edition ended with a twenty-two-page chapter that was cut in 1985, in which Nathan slept with his neighbor’s wife and was run out of town. A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983) was cut by one-third when Wendell revised it; he called the original version “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful.” And when The Memory of Old Jack (1974, revised 1999) was reissued, Wendell added an author’s note that said “When I began to write about the people of the imagined community of Port William in 1955, I had no idea that I would still be writing about them in 1999. I had no plan, and I still don’t” and that owned up to “‘errors’ of genealogy and geography.”  Many of Wendell’s edits over the years fall under that category of “errors” of genealogy and geography. He once said that he wanted to be sure “the outhouse was always on the same side of the river.” In 2004, Wendell’s daughter Mary Berry was hired by Counterpoint to make notes about geography and genealogy that were used to create the map of Port William and the family trees that are published with all the Port William novels and stories, both by Counterpoint and Library of America. All the editions since then have strived for consistency in those details. So when I come to edit Wendell’s books, I start by getting the most up-to-date versions of the texts from Jack. Then, I become something like a fact-checker. I send Wendell letters with lists of questions to create the explanatory endnotes that go in the back of the Library of America editions, as well as any typos or errors in the texts I either find or suspect. A few weeks later, I get back careful, handwritten explanations and sometimes further edits. For example, for the volume of the postwar novels and stories that will be published this month, I wanted to know why, in The Memory of Old Jack , Jack Beechum hears the song “Wildwood Flower” at a dance in 1888, when the first recording I could find by that title was by the folk group the Carter Family in 1928. I was convinced I had the wrong song! But it turns out I caught Wendell in an anachronism, and he revised the sentence so that it doesn’t name the song. Wendell also sent me a handful of corrections, including changing the name of Wheeler Catlett’s boss in Remembering , changing Dorie Catlett’s death date in the family tree, and moving the location of the Stepstone Bridge on the map of Port William. The United States, more than any other country in the world, is a nation founded on words and ideas, and it is important to preserve those words through careful textual and editorial work—especially at a time when words are often seen as unreliable, and unreliable texts proliferate on the internet. Maybe keeping “the outhouse always on the same side of the river” seems like a small thing, but I’m convinced that it makes a difference to be faithful to the details. Stefanie Peters is an editor at Library of America in New York City, where she has worked with writers including Louisa May Alcott, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Edwards, Ernest Gaines, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Edith Wharton. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Gracy Olmstead I read once of a culture in which children learned to walk long distances from a very early age. The story went that a three-year-old would be expected to accompany a parent three miles (being carried for much of the distance), and that a four-year-old should be willing to go four (again, not entirely on foot). The five-year-old would go five miles, the six-year-old six, and so on. The older the child, the greater their ability to trek long distances with adult help and support. The earlier the tutelage began, the greater their endurance and independence as they got older. Since then, I have not been able to verify the truth of the story, and so it might be false. Nevertheless, my three littles have been encouraged to do a lot of walking in their young lives, and we’ve sought to grow their mental tenacity in order to last through mental hikes and Sunday adventures. When we lived in Oxford, England, we did so without a car ( I’ve written about that here ), and so our kids got very used to walking 1.5 miles to church in the morning, or exploring the towpaths for a few miles on a Saturday. I noticed that they were often capable of long walks physically , but that the greater challenge was mental: in being willing to endure the slow monotony of walking. It is a process of teaching them how to notice and delight in the world around them, so that they realize how much wonder and joy there is in the walking process. Nowadays, I don’t have any trouble getting them to walk for three or four miles—the greatest challenge is that it takes us hours, because they want to stop and collect every rock, or to stare at every butterfly. It is a wonderful problem to have. Now that our children are getting older, we’ve embraced a new challenge. I do not just want my children to walk. I want them to navigate: to have a strong sense of where we are walking, and how to get there (and back again). The reasons for this are numerous, but I’ll touch on a couple of them here. Eventually, I hope this will help combat the modes of helicopter parenting and indoors-focused life so common among American kids these days . Eventually, I want them to be able to confidently walk outside our front door and navigate their neighborhood with a sense of ownership. I do not think they will be walking themselves to the park anytime soon, but at this stage, I do want them to be able to take me there, and direct me homewards. The older they get, the larger the navigational challenges we can pose. Can they take my husband and me hiking? Can they get us to the grocery store? To church? To their grandparents’ house? A second reason for this relates back to the importance of place and our relationship to it. I am convinced that our relationships with our places must be active rather than passive, animated by a sense of stewardship and belonging. But children do not grow these muscles if we constantly shuttle them around in a car and avoid interacting personally and actively with our landscapes. The instant they must lead themselves and others through that landscape, using their feet, eyes, and ears to interact with the soil, buildings, flora, fauna, and street signs, the landscape becomes theirs . This shift marks the beginning of a new relationship with place—one no longer defined by parents or family, but by their own sense of belonging and situatedness. In the UK, my oldest began to develop a clear sense of direction as we walked. She could recognize familiar street corners, signposts, and shops. She could take us comfortably from our home to the towpath, and from the towpath to central Oxford (and back). Now, however, we are living in Idaho suburbia. And I have realized that the challenge of navigation has changed drastically. Compare, just for example, these different street grids. The first few are random selections from Oxford’s residential areas, such as Jericho and New Hinksey: The streets don’t form a perfect square grid, but they have a logic and rhythm to them that is easy to follow. Streets all connect to each other, with homes lining them at regular intervals. A few streets terminate at the river or at various colleges, but there are almost always walking paths that take over and guide the walker where normal streets end. It is easy to explore this city without getting terribly turned around. Various parts of London are similar. (These are screenshots of Notting Hill and Chelsea.) Again, things are not perfectly geometric here, and there’s a chance you might get a bit turned around here and there. But the average walker can enjoy this city with ease because every neighborhood’s streets have a clear rhythm and cadence, a direction and a telos. Smaller streets connect back to larger thoroughfares. Side streets are easy to identify, and are punctuated with shops and markets where you might ask for directions. When you start walking in the wrong direction, it is relatively easy to turn yourself back around within a block or two, because streets rarely terminate except back into each other. Some United States neighborhoods are similar—especially the old ones. As a young journalist, I explored Washington, D.C. on a regular basis. This was pre-smartphone (at least for me), and so I often would look at Google Maps prior to leaving my office. I would pick a direction, identify the main streets I needed to follow, and then go on an adventure for an hour or two. On weekends, my then-fiancé (now husband) and I would embark on daylong walking quests, starting on one side of the city and walking to the other. These remain some of my favorite memories of D.C. I learned to know the city by foot, and grew an affection for its streets and neighborhoods that I never would have if I had only navigated by car. There’s an intuitive sense of a borough or street grid built in this way, when you proceed district-by-district and block-by-block. But then there’s suburbia. And with suburbia, that intuitive sense of place and direction drastically changes. I share these screenshots because I feel it is very easy to identify the problem from above. These are randomly selected screenshots from Idaho and northern Virginia. I will admit, the way the streets thread along like veins or root tendrils is decidedly pretty. It often creates pretty neighborhoods. But what does it mean to walk these streets without a phone? How does one explore these neighborhoods, or use them to get from point A to point D? As soon as we begin to walk—and to specifically walk with the aim of getting somewhere—things get difficult. Many streets terminate in a cul-de-sac, leaving the walker stranded and having to retrace their steps. Many other neighborhoods form an unexpected loop, which means the walker often assumes they will be able to proceed in an easterly direction only to get looped all the way back to their starting point. As my kiddos and I walked back from the park recently, I picked a different exit to navigate from. I had no idea which streets exactly would lead us home, but that was half the fun. I told them we needed to proceed south, and so we specifically picked streets that would take us south. But alas, this does not work in the suburbs. One street led us around in a circle. Two others were cul-de-sacs. We eventually made it back, and did so without consulting my smartphone, but the process was rather frustrating, even for me. The intuitive savvy of streetwalking changes when you are living in suburbia. Main streets and “side streets” all meld in a grid that often feels incomprehensible. Suburbia has its own language, and I am still learning it. To an extent, I think this is a flaw in suburbia itself, one that makes children less safe and independent in these neighborhoods. The easier it is to learn the language and pattern of the streets, the more confidence parents and children can have in navigating them. The instant we complexify that language, we are requiring greater expertise and maturity in order to navigate. I would argue that there is a pro-family and pro-child reason to build street grids in a more simple, traditional style, and it has to do with the children and their comfortability in these spaces. This said, I don’t want to be too biased against the suburbs. I grew up in a small rural town, and since then, have lived in cities. This means I am unversed in the language and pattern of suburban streets. It could be that, when it comes to learning to navigate suburbia, I will have to learn alongside my children, rather than being able to teach them. Gracy Olmstead is a journalist who focuses on farming, localism, and family. She is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind .   Her writing has been published in The American Conservative, The Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Christianity Today, among others. Read more of Gracy's writing on her Substack, Granola .   If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Mischa Willett In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot called poetry “a raid on the inarticulate.” I’ve always liked the phrase. It implies the chaotic mess of life in a postlapsarian world is mimicked in language’s fragmentary nature. It also implies poets can do something about it, diving into the deep as they find treasure and nourishment. Having found them, they can offer them for our benefit. There’s something clandestine about the whole operation—a raid—reminiscent of the Promethean theft of fire. If Eliot is right, and if the metaphor holds, we have a record of the greatest of such attempts in Charles Taylor’s new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment . What gold has surfaced? What nourishment is on offer? And how do we reconcile any of this with the God who is himself the Word, the logic, the order underlying everything? Taylor phrases it like this: “Romantic art as a response to the loss of cosmic order begets the aspiration to reconnect” (89). People feel a loss of connection in many dimensions: between one another, between themselves and nature, between themselves and the past. They feel, at least some of them, that poetry is a vehicle for mending that disconnect. Taylor’s animating question in this new volume is how this reconnection happens. Why does reading another human’s artful language momentarily alleviate the dislocation from reality many modern people feel? Experience Poetry Taylor diagnoses the modern condition: “We need a relation to the word, the universe, to things, forests, fields, mountains, seas, analogous to that we have to human beings we love and works of art; where we feel ourselves addressed, and called upon to answer” (130). Oh, how we experience this dislocation. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it! We’re relational by design and cry out like the very stones when estranged from our natures. His answer is that the experience of poetry—not simply to read it but “to let oneself be carried by it”—is to “experience a strong sense of connection” and that to feel the connection “is to strengthen it, to enter into it more fully” (18). Taylor briefly references music and painting but argues across 600 pages for poetry’s ability to engender such connections. Perhaps poetry creates a sense of connection because it asks so much of us. We aren’t passive receptors of poetry. We don’t watch it. Poetry doesn’t happen to us. Rather, readers enter into communion with another mind and collaborate to produce whatever meaning it can carry. That gives us both the dignity of work—sweat of our brow, fruit of our labor—and the sense of being addressed, of being trusted, that Taylor describes. Poetry's Power In Taylor’s schema, the way this connection is forged changes from poet to poet. For some poets, the connectedness of all things means poetry reveals a verifiable reality inherent in the universe. Readers of A Secular Age will recognize this as a transition beyond “the immanent frame,” though he doesn’t use that language here. As 19th-century poet Percy Shelley described it, “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” That is, eternity is white radiance, but we, creatures bound (for the moment) in time, perceive it as fragmentary and distorted. Or as Paul wrote, “Now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV). For later poets, however, the task isn’t to reveal cosmic truth but to produce an effect. Taylor writes, In the era where the traditional cosmic orders reigned unchallenged, the important intellectual achievement consisted in our grasping a vision of hierarchical order, which in turn inspired us to embrace certain ultimate values; but, in the Romantic period, the important goal was to gain a sense of connection which was life-enhancing . . . a connection which was “resonant.” (129) Along the way, Taylor puts to bed some misconceptions about poetry. For instance, he claims that “Romanticism was not the source of the dissociation of the three transcendentals” that many take it to have been. We cannot lay the loss of the true, good, and beautiful at the feet of the Romantics. For those tempted to diminish poetry’s power with accusations of navel-gazing, Taylor insists “giving vent to one’s personality is emphatically not the goal” (504). And he admonishes those who simply throw up their hands, saying they’re just not into poetry: “Not responding [to poetry] in this way is missing something important in the range of potentialities for a full life” (54). Taste. See. Discerning the Audience The book demonstrates awe-inspiring range and a fundamental belief in the power of art. Most philosophers are quick to pull everything down to first principles, to get at the “it” at the center of whatever question they’ve posed. For the most part, Taylor does this as well. Like some incarnate large-language model, he categorizes huge swaths of verse across centuries and languages to ask who dares to fly. Yet he never seems to doubt that people are capable of flight on the wings of poetry. Cosmic Connections is a broad-ranging, occasionally startling, and often moving book, yet it’s hard to know the target audience. It’s full of one-name references to thinkers with whom readers are presumably meant to be familiar. “So Proust,” is an entire sentence, referencing the French novelist’s enormous output and influence. Perhaps then it’s meant for literary specialists and other ubercultured sorts? But the readings of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and even Hopkins in the book examine only the most well-known poems such as one would find in a freshman literature anthology. Most are familiar, well-trodden paths for anyone in academia. So maybe it isn’t a book for scholars. Taylor seems to be after the sort of readers who (1) believe in poetry’s power, (2) are familiar enough with intellectual history to be on a first-name or even nickname basis with its trends (e.g., “Jena,” the name of a German town, carries huge significance for a small number of people trained in theories of the symbolic), and (3) read fluently in three or four languages (all poetic and philosophical quotations are rendered in the original languages first, rather than placed in footnotes) but (4) are unaware of the secondary literature on the major British Romantics (so, not professors or scholars). That’s a small area of the Venn diagram. Many threads and themes are picked up and unceremoniously dropped. Many outlines are furnished but not followed. For instance, the introduction promises to discuss British Romanticism, but fully half the book is dedicated to French surrealists and German philosophers. It then covers moderns like Eliot, Miłosz, and Rilke, with only a scant handful of pages on Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, the major British Romantics. What the book lacks in literary analysis, it makes up for in novel descriptions of the real. Fans of Taylor’s previous books will be on solid, familiar footing with observations such as this: “We normally live in a mental/emotional frame which is narrowly centered on us . . . but we can occasionally reach/leap beyond this, and live, really live, in a much bigger space; that is, feel this as our primary locus” (185). That’s not only profoundly true but beautifully argued, lovingly rendered, and as such—as much of this adventurous new tome does—it aspires to the condition of poetry. This may not be Taylor’s best book, but if only for its capacious range, it’s one worth appreciating. Originally published on The Gospel Coalition Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University .

by Pete Peterson and Leslie Thompson If you’ve been around the Rabbit Room for long, you’ve benefited from Leslie Thompson’s creative work, even if you haven’t realized it. She’s been involved behind the scenes in a wealth of ways over the years, whether it’s brand-managing the Every Moment Holy series, lending her voice and skills to the Rabbit Room Podcast Network, or building the Hutchmoot: Homebound and Hutchmoot websites. Beyond that, she works with a variety of other podcasts, like Charlie Peacock’s Music & Meaning , and Christianity Today’s weekly news podcast, The Bulletin . But while Leslie has been a long-time champion of others’ voices, it’s been a delight to hear her sharing more of her own. Last year, she wrote a number of liturgies for Every Moment Holy, Volume 3: The Work of the People , and now she’s launched a brand new podcast called Niche to Meet You. As someone who gets to work with Leslie on a regular basis, I’m constantly delighted by how curious she is about the people around her, and it was a delight to sit down and talk with her about where that innate sense of wonder comes from and how her curiosity has become part of her creative work in Niche to Meet You . Pete: You, Leslie Thompson, are no stranger to podcasting. This is not your first . . . I'm trying to come up with a funny metaphor instead of rodeo. Let’s just say that you do not have a low number of rodeos. Leslie: Cool, rodeos! I guess I'll say this: it's not my first podcast, but it's not my last, hopefully. In 2018, I started doing my first interviews for a show that I had completely made up. There wasn't anything it grew out of. I just wanted to learn how to pull all of the levers. So I did all the interviewing myself. I did all the editing, everything. It was called The Rogue Ones . Pete: Oh yeah, I remember that! Leslie: You were on it. Pete: Oh right! I went out to your house and you interviewed me! My, how the tables have turned. Leslie: Ha ha ha! And here we are now, yes indeed. So that was why I wanted to learn how to do it, because I loved it, and I thought I could do it, and I loved listening to them. And there's a lot of life leading up to that point. I had immersed myself in little things that all came together in podcasting. Things like audio editing, talking on mic, branding, building a thing. All these things kind of come together. From there, I started getting hired to do production on other shows. Pete: One of the things I love about you is that you've got a wildly overdeveloped sense of curiosity, and I mean that in a good way. Leslie: Yes, I'm taking that in a good way. Pete: It's not uncommon for us to be having a conversation, and you bring the whole conversation to a halt and say something like, “Wait a minute, what was that word you just said? I have to look up that word and figure out what it means, and I'm going to add it to my list of words.” Leslie: In a meeting two weeks ago, you said “draconian,” and it made my list. There were two words that week. It was “draconian,” and it was, where's my note of words . . . um, “wheedle.” You said wheedle. WHEEDLE. So yeah, I am wildly curious. And I will stop a conversation to learn something. But I think it comes from . . . I feel like I don't know anything. Pete: That sounds funny coming from somebody who's so curious and has so many interests. Leslie: Well, I don't know. I feel like we approach our insecurities with the right posture, they actually can become strengths. Pete: So they become “securities”? Leslie: That's right. Your insecurities can indeed become securities. It's because a certain part of yourself needs to be worked on, and that's okay. We all have those parts. Pete: That’s so interesting. I would never look at you and think, oh, she doesn't know very much. But the fact that you look at yourself and think you don't know very much drives you to curiosity about so many things. Leslie: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I've always felt like I was around smarter people than me, which is good. Being around the Rabbit Room has helped with that so much. In one of the first conversations we ever had, you talked about how terrible the old Mary Poppins was and how much you hated it. [Pete’s note: “Hate” is a strong word, but I’ll allow it.] And I just looked at you, and I said, “Pete, I disagree with you, and I don't know what to do with that because clearly you know more than me about films.” And it just broke this spell of my whole life, of being around all of these people who were clearly convinced about their thing, and I didn't agree with them, and that made me feel like I was wrong. Pete: Because it's not that people necessarily know more or less; it's just that some people state things more strongly or defend them more passionately. Leslie: And in such a way that it sounds definitive. Pete: Right. I'm certainly guilty of that. Leslie: You are! Yeah. But what's great is that you are also open because I believe your answer to that Mary Poppins thing was, “Well, why do you think it's better?” And so, we have very different opinions on movies, and maybe people reading this will side with you more than me [vote here] , but I don't care. I think I've become disinterested in letting other people's definitive opinions define me. So yes, I am wildly curious because I think it makes us better to be curious. Pete: Well, I love that. It's a huge strength. It's a great security. Leslie: It is a great security. I feel secure. Pete: That’s a good segue because my next question was going to be about where your new podcast, Niche to Meet You , comes from, and it seems you're suggesting that it arises directly from your curiosity. Leslie: This project is entirely based on who I am as a person. I've always had this interest in drawing people out. And so when you extrapolate that out over years, you start getting curious about things, and you find that people really like talking about the things they think are weird to other people. Pete: Or they love how weird it is. Leslie: Yes! And so this project has been years in the works because I also have this bad habit of trying to make something that shouldn't be a whole thing into a whole THING. For instance, I got into dog sledding, right? And then I ended up at the freaking starting line of the biggest race of the entire season. Pete: When you say you got into dog sledding, you mean you were driving? Leslie: No, no, it's worse than that, Pete. Pete: It's worse? Leslie: I get into dog sledding like people get into watching football who've never played football a day in their life. Like, I do the fantasy mushing thing, and I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible at fantasy mushing. Pete: Wait. Leslie: Yeah. Fantasy mushing. Fantasy dog sledding. Fantasymushing.com. You pick teams using coins. It’s a whole thing. Also, I am so bad at it. Normal people would be like, “I'll get a shirt,” or, “I'll watch the GPS tracker when Iditarod comes around,” or “Maybe I'll follow some Facebook pages.” But me? I went to the starting line of the 2020 Iditarod and wanted to be behind the scenes with arguably the most iconic musher of all time. He was a guest on my podcast in 2019, and that's what got me there in 2020. I have this propensity for going the extra mile . . . or two. Pete: That should be the tagline for the Iditarod. “Going the extra mile . . . or two.” Leslie: 1049 is the actual mileage. So yeah, the extra mile or 1049. So there are just these things in my personality that have led to Niche to Meet You. Pete: So, let's talk about the podcast specifically. It’s called Niche to Meet You . What is a “niche” in your mind? Leslie: Well, the description says, “Little-known hobbies, or niche subcultures,” because there are some things that bleed over from hobby into something else, like a lifestyle. Dog sledding is a great example. You have some people who essentially pay to play. A good friend of mine up in Wisconsin doesn't make very much from the sport of dog sledding, yet he's probably one of the biggest names in the field. And then, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s a family of mushers up in Alaska who make a real living with summer tours and the like. So it's not fair, I think, to merely call something a hobby because sometimes it becomes more than that. That’s why I bring in niche subcultures. For me, and for the purposes of this show, I focus on these central things if you were to talk to someone, they'd say, “Oh, I'm into this.” I’m interested in things you can discuss with people from all generations, all walks of life. Is it Warhammer 40,000? Is it dog sledding? Is it Santa portrayal artists? Nobody's gonna be uncomfortable. Pete: It's interesting that there's a sense in which, over time, certain niches cease to be niches. You've just done this miniseries on Warhammer 40K, but in another generation, there's a chance it could be the new Marvel Cinematic Universe. And in that future, everybody knows what Warhammer 40K is, and we're all sick of it. Leslie: Yes, right. Pete: It's interesting to look around and wonder about all those potential things that the next generation will not even think twice about. Leslie: What's interesting about the Marvel thing is that they're the biggest summer blockbusters. Everybody went to see Avengers: End Game . I mean, I even went to see that, and I enjoyed myself. I don't want to go to another one, but where it really becomes niche is when people are collecting the comics. Pete: Or cosplaying. Leslie: Cosplaying, yes. Going to the comic cons. And it becomes a larger part of your personality. When I talked to the creator of Warhammer 40,000 [a popular science-fiction/fantasy wargame] , I was coming from this hobby standpoint. He lays out the four things about hobbies that have become my grid for how I determine if, yes, this is something I'm willing to cover. First, you have to have some sort of craft. Now, it doesn't have to be art, but it has to be some sort of craft, something you would do with your hands. Second, skills have to be present. It has to be something you can hone over time. Third, socialization. Getting others around to do the thing. Finally, you can spend time thinking about the thing, the “hobby,” when you’re not actually doing that thing. I look to see if those four things are present, and that's how I define my subjects. So, in terms of, say, comic books, we can all go to a movie together and experience a Marvel film. So, that checks off the socialization aspect. But we aren't all collecting or appreciating the art. Pete: Or drawing, sculpting, painting, and all that, but then I can also say that I like the trading aspect of it. I can buy this here and sell it over there, and keep this one for five years, and that's a skill. Leslie: That's it. That's a skill. And then the fourth leg is thinking about it when you’re doing other things. So, while something might become part of mass culture, there are still niche subcultures around the thing. Pete: It also makes me wonder if there are some niche subcultures that we would identify as unhealthy. In high school, we called somebody a nerd sometimes because they were interested in a thing that isolated them rather than socialized them. Or at least according to our perception. And I wonder if things tend toward unhealthy when you don't have that, or if you don't have the opportunity to engage that socialization aspect. Leslie: It plays into one of the things that triggered my desire to do this show now. The surgeon general came out with a report early last year, 2023, which said that even before COVID, we were more isolated and lonely than we've ever been. And it's having serious health repercussions. Literally heart disease. There are studies that have proven that isolation leads to loneliness, which leads to deteriorating health. And those same studies reference other studies about leisure activities and hobbies being the sort of antidote. Even the surgeon general says that social interaction is the antidote. And what's even better is he takes it one step further and says that giving back and helping others is your sort of next step. So I think you're right in that anything done in isolation is not going to give us a full experience and a flourishing human experience. There are some things that are best done in private, right? But a thing that isolates us can cut us off from further doing the thing, doing it well, and helping other people, and engaging with other people. Pete: Maybe it’s fair to say that anything healthy should lead you to other people, not into isolation. Leslie: Yes, yes, yes. Because we've been put on this earth with others. We haven't been put on this earth in isolation, and there's a reason for that. Pete: With anything you love, I think there's an implicit desire to share that with somebody else. And we're frustrated when that's not the case. Leslie: I mean, there are immense wounds. I'm just taking clips from the show and putting them on TikTok. And there are people commenting on them, these men that have been playing Warhammer 40k for years saying that it is so touching to hear people talk about this subject like it matters. And I think for many of us, maybe it starts in high school where we're told what you do doesn't matter and go do that somewhere else. I think a lot of people are wounded. We are all wounded people from having those experiences over and over and over. And so humanizing these things that people have dehumanized over the years is giving a lot of healing to people. Pete: So let's talk specifically. In the podcast, you've come out with a fully-fledged miniseries on this thing we've been mentioning called Warhammer 40K. Can you briefly recap that a little bit? Leslie: I did a four-part miniseries about this sci-fi tabletop war game that has become, honestly, like a friend of mine at this point, and it is HUGE. Henry Cavill recently signed a deal with Amazon to do a film franchise in the 40K universe. We're all about to hear a lot more about Warhammer 40,000. And I thought this was an opportune time to profile it. So I’ve done this four-part series. That starts by giving an overview of the activity to orient the listener, and we start to introduce some of the characters present throughout the series. Episode two is typically where I experience the thing myself. So I try to play a game of 40k while learning about the folks who play it themselves, and in Episode three, I talk to the people who made the game. Episode four is all about the relevance. Why does it really matter? So that’s 40k. And there’s another miniseries coming on Wild Turkey Conservation. And that'll hit in the summertime. It's about birds, not liquor. Birds, not liquor. And I'll be spending two days at the NWTF conference in Nashville next week. That’s the National Wild Turkey Federation conference. Pete: You’re good with the acronyms. Leslie: A lot of research, Pete. But what compels me about it is that we’re talking about conservation, which, surprisingly, requires hunting. Those things work hand in hand. Conservation tends to be a very liberal idea. Hunting, very conservative. Pete: But they are inseparable. Leslie: Inseparable, right, exactly. And what I'd like to do, and we'll see if this actually happens, is I would like to tell a story of mending the gap at a time when we are heavily inundated with division. Pete: Are you going to go hunt a turkey? Leslie: I absolutely am. This Saturday, actually. It’s the end of hunting season, and a man named Farmer Billy is taking me out an hour before sunrise to call a turkey. I actually tried to call one on a friend’s property and could hear it, but couldn’t get it to come to me. Billy says turkey hunting is his favorite thing to do. So I’m expecting to finally see a gobbler. Pete: Amazing. It's fun. It's such interesting, creative work. I think for some people it's easy to forget just what a creative medium this is for you. Your ability to produce, shape, and present something to the audience, to the listener, that takes them on a journey, sounds great, and is engaging is the result of a whole lot of creativity on your part. Which is wonderful. It's not a thing that I have. Which is maybe why it's so fascinating for me to watch you do it. Leslie: Really? I think you do. Pete: Not in the journalistic way that you do. Leslie: You know, what I'm doing isn't original to myself, in that when you listen to the show you might hear things that sound like This American Life , or RadioLab , or Dolly Parton's America . And it's a highly creative process because, for example, when the music ends, when does it end? It's not just like, oh, it'll end when it's done. Pete: And you know when it's wrong, too. Leslie: Yes, so does the listener. But you have to feel the emotion of what somebody just said or, you have to imagine what is in the listeners’ heads right now and give it enough space for that to breathe? Or do I want to cut it off? Those sorts of creative choices are all over the place. Even though I'm just sitting at a computer with a hoodie over my head with a candle burning, and it's like 6:00 am before my child wakes up and I'm working on the script, I feel so creative. I feel like a rock star, honestly. It's a very rock and roll sort of atmosphere where you're just chugging coffee and zoned in. I could sit at a computer and work on this stuff, and ten hours could pass, and I wouldn't even know it. I've always felt that way about computers and tech stuff. Pete: I would argue that this is your niche. You've found a way to satisfy the communal need, the connection, that key socialization component, because the thing that you love drives you to other people. Not only through interviews and all that, but your editorial work with Chris Theissen, and then, ultimately, the goal is to connect with other people via your listenership. Leslie: Well, no creative work is really done in isolation, and I’m so grateful for Chris and his sensibilities as my co-conspirator and editor, but also to keep me from being totally alone. I have learned that while I am extroverted in a sense, I also like being at home; I'm a homebody, but if I'm not around people every few days, interacting with people, I get very dark and things get grim. So I've been able to craft a project that takes all of those things into account where I am getting to be this nerdy hermit creator, but then I can take that out and share it with other people. Pete: It just occurred to me that the title of the show, Niche to Meet You , is so much more than a pun. It implies social connection, as in “Niche,” this very specific and narrow thing that I do, is actually something I’m doing “to meet you.” You know what I mean? Leslie: Yeah, that's the whole point. Pete: I think you're doing great work, and I love the show. Everyone should love the show. Leslie: Thanks for talking, Pete! If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Rachel Donahue Hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. If you’ve been around the Rabbit Room for any length of time, you’ve heard of The Habit. You might be familiar with the podcast , the weekly newsletter , or possibly Jonathan Rogers’ work from Flannery O’Connor  to his swamp stories . But what about that community of writers he’s gathered who give each other a little more courage? The Habit membership  is a hub of community unlike anything any of us have experienced before. Agented authors and writing coaches are learning alongside hobby writers and amateurs—each of us here for the love of the craft. We work through classes and workshops together. We share interesting things around the “Water Cooler." We comment on and celebrate each other’s work. Even though our interaction is limited to a forum and the occasional Zoom meeting, our connections are deep and genuine, as evidenced by the five Habit writers’ retreats we’ve held at North Wind Manor. This community is one of the most generous and hospitable groups I’ve ever participated in. As an OG member of The Habit, I’ve heard many bits of writerly wisdom from the likes of C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Sayers, Harper Lee, Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse, Madeleine L’Engle, and more, but the line that has most profoundly impacted me over the years is Jonathan Rogers’ assertion that writing is a form of hospitality. This resonates deeply because exercising hospitality toward friends, visitors, and strangers is one of my favorite things. Real-world hospitality includes thoughtfulness, an anticipation of needs, a welcoming environment, and a regard for the dignity of the person being received or entertained. Hospitality also looks different in different cultures, so knowing something about who I am welcoming will change how I prepare to receive them. On the page, hospitality isn’t much different. Thoughtfulness about the presentation of an idea, the anticipation of what a reader needs (or doesn’t need!) to know, setting a scene that orients the reader, and care for how my words will affect the reader are all vital to my craft—as is knowing my audience. For any writer who’s not simply writing as a form of self-indulgence, the job is to communicate effectively, to create a scene that invites the reader in, and to show the reader something he couldn’t get for himself. Every writing tool, from grammar rules to Freytag’s pyramid, can be used in the service of hospitable writing. But here’s an important reminder I received at the most recent Habit retreat: hospitality doesn’t just go one way. Yes, the hosts go to a great deal of trouble to prepare the space for guests, but guests usually bring something to the table, too. Sometimes, it’s a literal gift—like a bottle of wine or sweet treats. Sometimes, it’s a story. Jonathan always reminds guests at a Habit retreat that much of the goodness we experience over the weekend is the welcome we extend to each other. This mutual hospitality affects how we speak and listen, how we inhabit the space, and how we make space for others. I saw this embodied once again at the most recent Habit Retreat. Friendly faces and voices welcomed one another around tables. Timid first-timers plucked up the courage to read aloud to an attentive, supportive crowd. Seasoned retreaters reveled in wordplay to everyone’s delight. Knowing that your audience is ready to laugh or cry or gasp in horror with you breathes confidence into how you put your words into the world. Taking this idea to the page, hospitality is not just about how we write but how we read what other people have written. Engaging with someone else’s work is an act of hospitality, too. When I pick up a book (or read a blog post!), I am sitting down at a table that my host has prepared. I am receiving what they have to give. I am extending the hospitality of a listening ear, the gift of my presence, and a willingness to commune over ideas. Not all writers or writing programs are hospitable (a couple of MFA grads testified to that during the retreat), and not all readers are a welcoming audience. But I can tell you this: of all the bookish spreads I’ve sampled over the years, it’s the most gracious, generous, writerly hosts who keep me coming back for more—and a great many of them are people I’ve met through The Habit. Rachel S. Donahue holds a B.A. in English and Bible from Welch College and enjoys travel, housewifery, and homeschooling while fulfilling her role as Chief Creative Officer of Bandersnatch Books. She wishes she could host you at Chittering Cottage (her family's home in NC) for a cup of tea and a chat. Instead, she’ll write you poems. She's published two collections: Beyond Chittering Cottage: Poems of Place, and Real Poems for Real Moms: from a Mother in the Trenches to Another. Find her work at  www.BandersnatchBooks.com . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Abram Van Engen Poetry fills the Bible. It spills from column to column and page to page. It covers one-third of the entire Old Testament. The book of Psalms, the largest book in the Bible, offers up 150 poems. Surrounding those poems, one prophet after another laments, condemns, and comforts in ringing lines of verse. The entire creation story of Genesis 1, quite arguably, has been composed as a single poem of repetition and variation, crowned by the creation of human beings: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - (Gen. 1:27) Poetry continues from the Old Testament to the New. When Paul falls into wonder and praise, he composes a doxology for a God he cannot grasp or understand (Rom. 11:33–36). And when he tries to comprehend the acts of an incarnate Christ who suffers and dies on behalf of sinners, he finds himself reaching for a poem (Phil. 2:1–11). That incarnated God was not short of poetry himself. What are the Beatitudes but an unrhymed poem? Jesus’s poetry partakes of the same impulse that led him from parable to parable. When the disciples asked Jesus why he spoke so often in stories and tales, Jesus did them one better: he answered with a poem (Matt. 13:14–15). Clearly, God delights in poetry. The question is whether and in what ways the people of God do too. This book is not about the many poems of the Bible. Instead, it asks what we can learn about the art of poetry from its prevalence in Scripture. Biblical lines of verse open onto a whole world of poetry—ancient and modern, rhymed and unrhymed, Christian and non-Christian. If God delights in poetry, how might we also partake in that pleasure and pursue the distinctive uses and particular functions of a poem? The Bible beckons beyond itself. It invites us to experience the art of poetry, old and new and everything in between. To take up this invitation, however, we have to accept one simple claim up front: that poetry is for us . We will never read a poem if we assume that poetry has been written for someone else. True, poetry can  be difficult (though certainly not all of it). And true, some poets do seem to write almost exclusively for one another (though certainly not all of them). But most poems enter the world in and through the hope of reaching ordinary people. Poets spend their lives carefully placing one word after another in order to touch us with some turn of phrase or quirk of words. Like the prophets and psalmists before them, poets write not for themselves—or at least not for themselves alone. They write always, as well, for us. In his great book Adorning the Dark , the singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson gives new artists a simple piece of advice: “Always, always remember to love the listener,” he says. Great artists make art for others. Singers who love their listeners remember that the song is not finally for themselves. As Peterson reminds us, “art isn’t art until it’s experienced by another.” Poets also hold that point dear. Their work takes shape in light of the readers who give it life. “But how do you actually read poetry?” This earnest question came to me after I had just taught a class at church. I was recommending some books, and I talked about the difference between an anthology and a book of poems by a single author. I like show-and-tell, and I held up several examples. Class ended and people wandered out, but one man stopped at the podium. “Sure,” he said, “I get it. You like these books. But books of poetry . . . I mean, if I had one, what would I do  with it? How do you actually read  poetry?” Poetry invites this question far more than other genres. The look of it often throws people for a loop. Everyone knows how to read a novel. You open the book and start reading. The same goes for memoirs, histories, almost any sort of bound book, really. We don’t think about how to read. We just do. Give us a book of poetry, however, and we might feel stumped. Where do we start? How do we proceed? Do we begin at the beginning? Do we flip to the middle? Do we keep reading after each poem, or do we stop and meditate? Is each poem self-contained? Should we read just one poem a day? And what about within the poems themselves: Are we supposed to pause at the end of every line? Are we meant to read out loud or silently? How, exactly, do we read  poetry? Here is my well-studied and expert advice: it doesn’t matter. Just read it. Begin at the beginning if you want. That’s what I like to do. I start on the first page of a book of poems, and I read it to the end. It doesn’t usually take too long. Most books of poetry barely top one hundred pages, and most pages contain very little ink. In terms of brevity, poetry turns out to be easier  to read than almost anything else you encounter. In a matter of minutes, you can cover a whole host of poems. I start at the beginning, but other readers skip around. They choose a random page. They glance through titles in the table of contents and pick a few that seem compelling. Whatever the practice, the point is the same: just read. No flaming sword swings back and forth to guard the entrance. Any way will do. As for finding which poetry book to read, here again, I have solid advice: any practice will do. Look for one that seems intriguing. Start with a single author or pick out an anthology. You can choose any number of short, cheap collections on various themes, like love poems or elegies. Yale University Press sells two fantastic poetry anthologies edited by Christian Wiman: one on “joy” and the other on “home.” Kevin Young recently put together an extraordinary collection of African American poetry spanning 250 years. You could try reading the supposedly “100 best-loved poems” (Dover sells that one for about four dollars), or you could look for poems that no one seems to know. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you read. Test the waters. Hop from pool to pool and puddle to puddle. Splash around in the world of poetry. Have a little fun. Once you begin, keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t question yourself. Read until you find yourself caught by a poem, touched, spoken to, challenged, recognized. We are seeking an instance of resonance. Confusion, boredom, and frustration you will find, absolutely. But pleasure and delight, a sudden movement of the heart, will take you by surprise. Push through the coats and mothballs in the wardrobe of poetry until you find yourself unexpectedly brushing up against real trees, a whole world you didn’t expect, something unpredictably wonderful. That’s the introduction. That’s the inauguration. Mark that poem and remember it. For this poem is the door that opens to all the rest. All you need to do is find that door. Abram Van Engen is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and Executive Director of The Carver Project . He is the author of two books on early American religion and literature, and he also serves as co-host of the podcast Poetry For All . He is also the author of Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church.

by Andy Patton Everyone alive today—unless they live in remote places where the changes of the past 500 years have not touched them as deeply—is a citizen of modernity. We are all living in modernity’s matrix. It is in us, and we are in it. I am no different. As I write this, I’m on a train and still getting wifi even though we’re moving at 100 mph. There are probably satellites involved. I’m listening to Spotify, and the library of human musical achievement is available at the swipe of a finger. I’m writing on a computer assembled on the other side of the planet. It is the concatenation of 10,000 technologies. It was made using rare earth metals born in the gravity tides at the edge of a black hole only to be sent careening across the galaxy to become the cloud of space dust that became planet Earth. Then they became my Mac. But what is modernity?  David Wells describes it this way: “Modernity is the language that those who are modernized speak. The external shaping of our world by the process of modernization typically creates an internal world of diminished cognitive horizons, appetites for affluence, a definition of meaning in terms of material possessions, an ethic that equates what is efficient (or what is self-serving) with what is morally right, and the relocation of all meaning from the outside world of creation and the public world of human organization to the inside, private world of intuition and of the self.” That’s us. That’s me. Put this way, modernity is the plausibility supersystem in which we live and move and have our being, the thing we think before we think we are thinking. It is the prevailing consciousness today which conditions all human ideas and actions. It is the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the system, the matrix, the way of life and thought that has come to dominate the West. It is the air we breathe and the water we drink. Modernity in this sense is true of almost all Westerners (an increasingly true of everyone else in the world). It unites people across all the other divides that might separate them. Even the most polarized and entrenched groups from the Left or the Right will still believe that the world can be improved by rendering all things countable, for instance. They will both still reach toward instrumental rationality when something goes wrong (a habit captured so elegantly in the phrase “There’s an app for that”). Despite all the things that still divide us, we are all moderns now. From my seat on the train, I have access to power and knowledge that has been the domain of the gods for most of human history. I am Hercules and the Oracle of Delphi. All these changes have made me a different sort of being than my ancestors. My body has become integrated with modern technology in subtle ways . Even the structure of my brain has changed, rewiring itself to help me cope with the flashing, the noise, the speed of modern life.  A woman joined me in the row not long after I sat down. Her oversized, puffy coat is spilling across the armrest onto my half of the row. The tag is scratchy. I thought about mentioning it, but she closed her eyes and went to sleep. So I am writing about it instead. Comfort is essential to me. Like all citizens of modernity, my life moves between thousands of little comfort objects every day. I wake up in cotton sheets. I shuffle to the kitchen in slippers. I drink my coffee, which is made by my choice of brewing gizmos. My house is always just the right temperature. If I have a headache, I can take a pill to make it disappear. If I get sick enough, I can go to a hospital, and machines will look inside my body. Then they will gently put me to sleep, open my body, cut out what is wrong, and seal it up again like God making Eve of Adam’s rib and closing the hole afterward. Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. There is a scene in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris in which Owen Wilson finally receives the opportunity to stay in the earlier epoch that he so romanticizes, and he realizes that if he does, he will have to live through his headaches and endure his surgeries while conscious. That seals the deal. He returns to his own time in 2010. Though we complain when there is a rip in the fabric of the seamless dream of comfort and convenience we weave around ourselves, which of us moderns would trade it all away? Maybe Wendell Berry. I suspect I am too accustomed to my coffee, slippers, and Ibuprofen. But today, I am annoyed. It seems this train is going to be late. I have a full day, and now my thumbs are tapping out texts that will rearrange my schedule on the fly. I like it when things run smoothly and efficiently. As a good modern man, I consider optimization my birthright. I have the (largely unexplored) presupposition that if something can be improved upon, it should have been by now. If it has not gotten better yet, surely soon it will. Science has pulled so many rabbits out of its hat that deep down, I’m sure the magic will roll on forever. There is an unproven but powerful hypothesis drilled into me: given enough time, we will make everything all right. Surely, at least 51% of things are getting better every year. This hypothesis makes modern people very optimistic despite the fact that there is ample evidence that even though things are improving, they are getting worse, too. But modernity isn’t making things better, per se. Instead, it is making everything more powerful. Power multiplies by magnitudes over time. Everything is moving faster now and making a bigger impact: thoughts, bodies, messages, missiles. The modern age has seen the elimination of many of the things that killed, sickened, bothered, or aggrieved humans throughout history, but it has also invented a slew of new ways to die, sicken, be bothered, or meet face-to-face with that feral, prowling enemy, grief. Despite the optimistic promises, modernity will never deliver utopia. Already, the cracks are showing. Local cultures are dissolving in the face of globalization. Species are vanishing. The twentieth century was the bloodiest yet. For the first time in human history, we are capable of destroying all life on the planet, and not only in one terrible way but many. If the futurists are right, more are on the way once we fully unzip and plunder the genome and begin tinkering with the nano realm.  Despite the information around us, we trust in strange ways now. The internet has inflamed our passions and girded our patriotism, but we all have the nagging question of whether we have been deceived. As time goes by, the question grows. We are both more empowered and more disempowered than ever. The woman next to me on the train has begun to snore. I swap out my wireless earbuds for my big, ear-encasing headphones. Now, safely ensconced in a private, curated soundscape, I return to writing. Everyone around me is nicely buffered from everyone else by the devices in front of them. We have all wrapped ourselves in sights and sounds that would have seemed like magic to an earlier age. We are bodies pressed together, but we are dreaming separate dreams in separate worlds.  I’m as dislocated as anybody these days, having lived in a handful of states in my childhood and as many countries in my adulthood. I call many places “home,” but for us moderns home is not what it used to be. For most of human history, people died where they were born. The people they shared their place with, they shared their lives with. Today, we are potted plants—transportable and mobile-ready. We are root-bound, having learned the skills of being wrapped around ourselves. We carry our dislocation with us. Places still evoke many sentiments, but they are not the sentiments that long endurance in a place brings; they are often shallow and wide, quick and vivid. We try to capture the kinds of sentiments in snapshots that we can share with our followers to gain more followers. It takes intention if you want to stay in one place. There are forces arrayed against you, like a rock in the riverbed. The current wants to sweep you downstream. And if you can stay put in one place, you will see everyone else come into and out of your life as the currents of modernity carry them out to sea.  Some drown. Is this the Good Life? All this makes you pause and ask: Is this the good life? If not, what is? I have coffee in the morning and Netflix at night, but am I choosing my weekly, daily, and moment-by-moment rhythms, or are they choosing me? I can get my work done while on a speeding train, but have I retained the ability to slow the pace of my life down enough to be able to walk with the Living God? I can watch trade skill tutorials on YouTube and try mixing mortar to tuckpoint a wall, but that is worlds apart from the careful discipline it takes to become the disciple of a craft. I can use Google to help me skim across the river of human knowledge like a stone, but am I growing wiser? Am I becoming like the tree in Psalm 1—able to sink my roots down into the river of God’s richness and meditate on his ways day and night? When everything is offered to me, what will I deny myself and why? In the words of Kathleen Norris from The Cloister Walk , the prophet’s task “is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves.” Modernity supplies many answers to the questions about the good life, but I suspect that I am surrounded by too many advocates and too few prophets. Sometimes, it seems that if I could even manage not to be swept off my feet by the swirling changes all around me, it would be a great gift to offer the world. I would be like T. S. Eliot’s man who “appears to run away when he takes the opposite course,” but only because he lives in a world of fugitives. As I got off the train, I realized I knew the woman who was in the seat next to me, the one with the coat. We used to work together, but I had not seen her in years. Nor had I seen her in the four hours we sat together. By the time I realized it, she was walking away.  So it goes in modernity. Andy Patton is the creator of the Darkling Psalter , a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms paired with new poems. He writes about biblical theology at Pattern Bible and co-edits a newsletter of cultural resources at Three Things . He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He works for the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member at L'Abri Fellowship in England. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Ruth Naomi Floyd The journey, survival, resistance, resilience, protest, and creativity of the enslaved Africans in America possess the courageous passage from deepest despair to defiant joy. As with all history, the history and music of the enslaved Africans in America have human life, faces, and spirit. The African American Spirituals were the creation of the African prisoners of the forced labor system in America. From Africa, the enslaved Africans in America brought their musical instincts, talents, and traditions. They used their primary native African rhythms and, out of that, created the African American Spirituals. The African American Spirituals are the musical expressions of the quest for dignity, equality, and freedom. African American Spirituals included religious and work songs, field hollers, and chants. The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass stated: “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”  From the outset, enslaved Africans in America were deprived of their languages, families, and cultures. Yet, in the midst of great sorrow and deepest despair, with no liberation in sight, these dehumanized, oppressed, and abused African captives lifted their heads, composed songs, opened their mouths, and sang. The transformative power of this music embodies the values of dignity and the fight for justice and equality. In their bondage, these men and women expressed their journey through their creativity in musical expression. They composed a body of work that birthed the Blues, Ragtime, Gospel, Jazz, Rap, and Hip-hop and has deep roots in Pop, Country, Rock, and more. Freedom arrived, and finally, Juneteenth arrived. The National Museum of African American History and Culture shares the history of Juneteenth: “On 'Freedom’s Eve,' or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free. Union soldiers, many of whom were black, marched onto plantations and across cities in the south reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation spreading the news of freedom in Confederate States. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment  did emancipation end slavery throughout the United States. But not everyone in Confederate territory would immediately be free. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as " Juneteenth " by the newly freed people in Texas.  The post-emancipation period known as Reconstruction (1865-1877) marked an era of great hope, uncertainty, and struggle for the nation as a whole. Formerly enslaved people immediately sought to reunify families, establish schools, run for political office, push radical legislation and even sue slaveholders for compensation. Given the 200+ years of enslavement, such changes were nothing short of amazing. Not even a generation out of slavery, African Americans were inspired and empowered to transform their lives and their country. Juneteenth marks our country’s second Independence Day. Although it has long celebrated in the African American community, this monumental event remains largely unknown to most Americans. The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times.” History shows us that freedom is not free. After Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws were imposed following the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The burden of this "newfound freedom" shifted the music of African Americans, and the Blues were born.  The African American Spiritual "Oh Freedom" emerged after the Civil War. Its poignant lyrics, steeped in grief and a yearning for complete freedom, reflect the struggle for dignity and the unwavering hope that sustained the community in the fight for equality and justice.  Oh, Freedom! Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom! Oh, freedom over me And before I'd be a slave I'd be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free. No more weepin'  No more weepin'  No more weepin' over me And before I'd be a slave I'd be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free. They’ll be singin’ They’ll be singin’ They’ll be singin’ over me And before I'd be a slave I'd be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free. Remembering this history means acknowledging and honoring the past, learning from these historical events, and ensuring that the lessons of the past are not forgotten. Remembrance preserves collective memory and under stands past generations' sacrifices, struggles, tribulations, and triumphs while recognizing historical events' impact on our present and future. Remembrance helps create empathy and resilience and reminds us that human experiences shape our community, world, and future. When we don't tell the historical truth, we lose the opportunity to witness and share God's redemptive beauty. The enslaved Africans survived the harsh system of slavery, and yet it did not kill their music. In the midst of the darkest time in American history, there was beauty. There was redemption. The prophet Zephaniah tells us that God sings over us with joy. Our singing God took something horrific and made beauty out of it. Beauty was redeemed, and God did it through song. Read this article  from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg Newsroom to learn about the complicated history, significance, and celebration surrounding the struggle for freedom.   Ruth Naomi Floyd is a vocalist, composer, flutist, educator, independent historical researcher, photographer, and justice worker. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

Editor's Note: This post resumes  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces (or extracts) followed by one more substantial work. Thin places—a concept familiar to some Rabbit Room visitors, I'm sure—seem fanciful, if not absurd, to many of our contemporaries. This is the Celtic idea that certain locations on earth have a closer connection to heaven than others, as if the transcendent was almost tangible there. This is not the place for debating the extent or likelihood of such places, merely to suggest that the arts as a whole, and music in particular, can function similarly. So let us get into the right frame with a brief aperitif, before kicking off the 5&1 list proper. Celtic Dance (Anon, Scottish trad.) Garth Knox (viola d'amore) and Agnès Vesterman (ce llo) Garth Knox is an Irish classical and folk string player, and he has particularly been interested in the Viola d'amore , which is a medieval forerunner of the modern Viola. It is bigger than a violin, having seven or eight strings, but is still played under the chin. This is a lovely, simple arrangement of a traditional tune that evokes windswept Scottish Highlands or islands such as St Columba's Iona or St Magnus's Orkneys. 1. Faire is the Heaven (1928) Sir William Harris (1883-1973, English); Text: Edmund Spenser (1553-1599, English) VOCES8, Apollo5 & Barnaby Smith (cond.) One way to make a connection with the transcendent is to try to evoke it in words. That's something the Metaphysical Poets (like John Donne or George Herbert) sought to do, for example. But a few years before them, the Elizabethan Edmund Spenser (he of Faerie Queen fame) also had a shot in his 1596 work An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie . He piles vision upon vision drawn mainly from biblical sources, but he is wise enough to admit defeat: How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse / The image of such endlesse perfectnesse? William Harris was an experienced church musician, and when writing this anthem, he was longtime organist at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. He decided to set a few stanzas from Spenser's poem for two unaccompanied choirs. Medieval chapels were essentially long corridors, with pews arranged in parallel rows all along the north and south walls. St George's is no exception. The choir sits roughly in the middle of the building, on either side of the aisle so, like the rest of the congregation, they face one another. Harris makes the most of this physical arrangement, by having each 'choir' echo or prompt its opposite. The musical effect is magical, evoking a sense of the celestial choirs spurring each other on to greater praises (listen out for the resounding Archangels and the sublime soprano line in the very last bars). The piece is glorious: it always feels to me like stained glass in sound. But it is even better to sing! 2. There Will Be No Mysteries ('A Hidden Life', 2019) James Newton Howard (1955- , American) James Newton Howard, James Ehnes (violin)  & Andrew Armstrong Sometimes an artist will intentionally seek to create a thin place. A recent cinematic example—which in my opinion and indeed experience—succeeded with astonishing power, is Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life . Franz Jägerstätter was a peasant farmer from in a small community living in the Austrian Alps near the German border. He and his wife, Fani, have three daughters and are popular with everyone. When the Second World War comes, he is called up into the army. However, when he refuses to swear absolute allegiance to Hitler out of his Christian convictions, he is arrested. His family are ostracized while he refuses to back down even at his trial, and so is sentenced to death. He was executed in August 1943. It is a powerful story, but from a dramatic point of view, it might seem insufficient to sustain nearly three hours of film. In Malick's hands, however, it is an astonishing visual experience. He crafts a cinematic love-letter to the lush beauties of creation as a way of articulating Franz's deep conviction's about the life to come. Heaven implicitly has accessible tangibility that is more real than this earth, not less. This serves to make Franz's courageous faith more understandable, and even wise. His hope for the new creation makes complete sense in the light of his love for the first creation. And James Newton Howard's adds glorious depths to this sense. For then, "there will be no mysteries" - all will be laid bare. 3. Quartet for the End of Time: V. Praise to the Eternity of Jesus (1941) Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992, French) Joshua Bell (violin) , Stephen Isserlis (cello) , Michael Collins (clarinet) , Olli Mustanen (pi ano) NB this is not the Joshua Bell recording in the playlist because that is inaccessible in some regions. The odd combination of instruments for this Quartet is the direct result of who was available to Messiaen at the time of its composition. He was a French soldier in a German Prisoner-of-War camp (Stalag VIII-A in what is now Poland) and the only others who had been musicians before the war played the violin, cello and clarinet. The whole piece lasts 50 minutes and is divided into eight sections. It was premiered in the camp, profoundly affecting everyone who heard it, prisoners and guards alike. As Messiaen remembered, "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension." He wrote at the start of the score that it was inspired by verses from Revelation 10. Section V is scored as a duet for cello and piano and marked 'infinitely slow'. The whole quartet is written 'for the end of time' not in the sense of the end of the world but more literally: for the time when there will be no more time. So he tries to escape the burden of tempo and rhythm to evoke eternity. Of course, that is next to impossible, since we can never escape time in this life. Instead, Messiaen's idea is to evoke through music an illusion of being without time. As such it is an utterly beguiling but strange, other-worldly piece (of which this section is just one part). 4. Spem in Alium, a 40-part motet (c1570) Thomas Tallis (1505-1585, English) Taverner Consort, Andrew Parrott (cond.) Having visited the poetic world of Elizabethan England with Spenser, we return to dip into the period's sound-world. Thomas Tallis was one of music's great survivors, no mean feat in the religious and political turmoil of the Tudors. He was careful to keep his head down when it was necessary, but his musical genius was a key factor in his changing political masters' keenness to keep him around. Spem in Alium is one of his masterpieces. From a then familiar latin text, he weaves wonders. Where as Harris composed for two choirs (with four parts each), Tallis composes for eight, each with five lines (the men are divided into three instead of the usual two by adding a baritone line). If these choirs are distributed around a building, say, the effect on the congregation can be overwhelming. The rich harmonies travel in constantly changing waves around the listeners until all eight choirs come in with a resounding Respice (look down) and remain together until the very end. 5. Eternity's Sunrise (1997) Sir John Tavener (1944-2013, English) Patricia Rozario (soprano) , Choir and Orchestra of The Academy of Ancient Music, Paul Goodwin (cond.) Sir John Tavener was a bit of a superstar in his day. Widely respected in the classical music world, he was also fêted by the likes of The Beatles (who released a disc of his music on their Apple label) and Björk, for whom he compose a piece to premiere. But it was when his Song for Athene was sung at Princess Diana's funeral that he came to global prominence. Having converted to Greek Orthodoxy in his 30s, he is perhaps best known for his theologically inflected music. So when invited by Alfonso Cuarón to collaborate on the score for the latter's   film of P. D. James's Children of Men , Tavener wrote several new pieces (such as Fragments of a Prayer ) and incorporated some older works. Eternity's Sunrise was one, originally composed in 1997 after his father's death. Because Princess Diana died later that same year, he subsequently dedicated it to her memory. He combines two poems by William Blake ( Auguries of Innocence and Eternity ) and sets them for soprano solo (representing earth), handbells (representing angels) and a baroque band (representing heaven). The world is thus shown to be a mirror of the eternal world, much as Malick's movie suggested. The Dream of Gerontius (Op. 38, 1900) Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934, English) Peter Pears (tenor), Yvonne Minton (soprano), Choir of King's, Cambridge, London Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (cond.) When Elgar finished writing the score to this epic work, he borrowed lines from John Ruskin that began, 'This is the best of me...' He poured his life and soul into his majestic setting of Cardinal Newman's weighty 1865 poem, The Dream of Gerontius (meaning 'old man). Newman is exploring his still relatively new Catholic faith (he converted from Anglicanism in 1845). He imagines Gerontius' journey from when he is lying in his deathbed, all the way through various trials, to his climactic encounter with God for judgment. At that point, he pleads to be removed from God's presence in order for him to be purified in Purgatory. For this convinced Protestant (on issues of purgatory and heavenly grace, at the very least), this is quite the theological problem! The doctrine is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and seen only in a fleeting reference in the Apocrypha. The idea seems to undermine the very reality of God's grace given in Christ's finished work at the cross. It runs counter, therefore, to the very heart of gospel! With all that said and clarified, I still can't leave this work out and find myself coming back repeatedly. It is written on an epic scale and goes from moments of acute intimacy and vulnerability to breathtaking scenes celestial grandeur. When Gerontius cries out after meeting God 'Take me away' every ounce of my being wants to shout out 'NOOOO!'. But Elgar's guidance up until that point has led me to reflect on my mortality and eternal hope more than any other piece of music. Stream this playlist: