“Erc was a great cairn of a man. His belly was where the stones buckled out under their own weight. His feet was where a pair of them had tumbled to the ground. His head was a boulder on top that was cracked straight across. He could open this jagged crack of a mouth wide as a stone cave and bellow out of it all manner of wild flummeries he’d learned from the days when he was a druid.
“Ah-h-h-h! Yah-h-h-h! God is the wind that blows over the sea… the wave of the deep… the bull of the seven battles… the tear in the eye of the sun.”
His breath had the musty moulder and damp of caves to it. The words rushed forth thick as bats but more of them got left within that ever come out because there’s never been the likes of druids for secrets.”

— Buechner, again, this time describing the monk Erc, in Brendan.

February 06, 2012

“Ailred was fourth. They say as a babe he reared up like a lily in his tub and spoke the Pater Noster through nor would take of his mother’s teat for the forty days and night of Lent save Sabbaths. He grew to a sheaf of bones made fast round the middle with a monk’s rope.
The pictish king of Galloway was the devil fleshed. He had the gold eyes of a toad and a forked beard. On cold nights he’d slit a slave’s belly open like a sack so he could dabble his feet in the warm bowels. He tied together the limbs of women in labor for sport and drank blood. Ailred went to him. Throned on a rock, the king was picking his teeth with the bone of a weasel when Ailred knelt and watered his shins with tears. They say a light went forth from Ailred then that blinded the king’s gold eyes, and a creature was seen passing forth out of the king hung all over with bottles of the blood he’d drunk, and the king swore holy faith from that day on and took him the name of Ailred for his own. Thus with no loss of seed or purity, my friend got him a son that day upon the rock, and Jesu a forkbeard, pictish knight though blind as a bat from that day on.”

— From page 5 of Godric, by Frederick Buechner. Open this book at random and you will find a miraculous piece of writing wherever your eyes land.

February 06, 2012

“In his 1939 lecture on Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry, Eric Gill compared the artist and the modern industrial laborer. They have much in common: “Both are normally engaged in making things. Both are normally workers with their hands. Both are normally paid for what they do and not paid if they don’t do it. (In this respect unlike either the man of business or the politician.) Both are commonly instructed as to what is required of them before they begin working.” Gill argued that the key difference is one of responsibility: “The artist is responsible for the form and quality of what his deeds effect; he is the responsible workman; he has responsibility and would be insulted if he were denied it; but the workman, the labourer, the hireling, the factory hand has been, as the theologian puts it, reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility; he neither has responsibility nor does he now desire it. He is too deeply corrupted by his serfdom. The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.”
Gill argues further that the detachment of labor from artistic responsibility for the products of labor distorts modern understanding of the “fine arts.” Fine arts are “very important and even enthralling,” he says, but “only as important and enthralling as they now are by reason of the fact that the common arts in our sort of mechanized society do not give any scope for the satisfaction of those specially fine feelings which our fine artists are now the special purveyors of.””

— Peter Leithart, Irresponsible Labor. Cf. this.

January 24, 2012

January 23, 2012

Flannery O'Connor reads A Good Man is Hard to Find at Notre Dame in 1959, I believe. Good Man is the first Flannery story I read, and it was probably the first story that ever shocked me—my jaw actually dropped. I remained completely startled and unsettled by it in my subsequent readings of it until I heard this recording, when for the first time I could hear how funny it is, too (“his head was as smooth and round as a cabbage…”).

Western Steam no. 17: Union Pacific passenger special, Medicine Bow, Wyoming by Joel Jensen (first discovered in his book Steam: An Enduring Legacy). — Western Steam no. 17: Union Pacific passenger special, Medicine Bow, Wyoming by Joel Jensen (first discovered in his book *Steam: An Enduring Legacy*).

January 17, 2012

Great Plains no. 15: Last light by Joel Jensen.

January 17, 2012

Birmingham Is Not New York: 5 Cautions for Arts Ministry →

January 13, 2012

Via commentmagazine:

Start with where you are. If your church is in a region with a strong history of quilt making, that should be the starting point for your arts ministry. Don’t open with a white cube gallery space. Take a lot of time to listen to the artists and designers in your church to understand the history and legacy of the creative process in your region. Think outside just painting and architecture. Contra dancing, shape-note singing, and street art murals are a few of the examples of regional art that you ought to spend time thinking about and participating in. Before turning your narthex into a gallery, why not ask experienced woodworkers in your congregation to make a table for communion? Before trying to create a concert space where touring bands can play, support already existing local efforts to promote music.

What if your church is in a region that doesn’t have a strong tradition of anything?

January 04, 2012

A short Washington & Idaho Railway freight trundles over two of the few remaining rails left on the Palouse. Near Belmont, Washington, mid-December, 2011.

As it happens, my buddy Joel P. King was at the throttle on this one.

January 03, 2012

January 03, 2012

Trees in the low winter sun, Columbia County, Washington.

J.C. Penney Co., The Dalles, Oregon. William Eggleston I ain’t, but I’m trying.

January 03, 2012

“
If you understand your own place and its intricacy and the possibility of affection and good care of it, then imaginatively you recognize that possibility for other places and other people, so that if you wish well to your own place, and you recognize that your own place is a part of the world, then this requires a well-wishing toward the whole world.

In return you hope for the world’s well-wishing toward your place.

And this is a different impulse from the impulse of nationalism. This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation.
”

— Wendell Berry, discovered via Front Porch Republic, who provided this link to an interview with the man himself. Lots of conservative Christians try to make a case for a principled “Christian patriotism”, but it rarely amounts to more than a “principled” defense of modern idols and abstractions—like “nations”. But “the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation”… this is beautiful. This sweeps away the abstractions, the inhuman scale of the modern nation, and puts in its place something that can be comprehended, understood, embraced, and truly loved for what it actually is. It replaces abstract notions of “patriotism” and “nations” with the relations among your land, your neighbor, yourself—and, implicitly, your God.

December 19, 2011

“… [T]o me, craft work is the ultimate. Maybe I got this idea from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, who was employed as a sculptor to the state and church, making coins and things. While he admired Michelangelo, he also made fun of his spiritual angst with art. I think a master craftsman is someone who is unpretentious. He has a physical object in front of him and, while he works with a higher aim, he doesn’t let his personality get in the way of his art. It’s simply about the task at hand and to make it as functional and necessary to the world as he can. So much of what people are making now is unnecessary. It’s useless. I want to make something that’s useful to someone, somewhere.”

— Cass Mccombs, Interview on Pitchfork. (via stervenson)

December 16, 2011

Farm house, by Texas photographer Shannon Richardson, discovered at American Elegy. — Farm house, by Texas photographer Shannon Richardson, discovered at *American Elegy*.

December 15, 2011

The old Palouse & Lewiston in the canary grass by the E. Whittier Road crossing, Spokane County, Washington.

December 12, 2011

“
While I was still in the hospital, I thought a lot about the fact that our life is a gift. My life was a gift before this all happened, but my sense of the dramatic wonder of that fact has deepened considerably. The Creed that we regularly recite refers to the Holy Spirit as the Lord and Giver of life. It’s all too easy to recite that phrase as a matter of cold theological description. We can affirm such things with a kind of clinical detachment, rather like the medical report of my condition read by the doctors and nurses caring for me last month. But theology should always issue in doxology, and since my experience of the near loss of life, the vocabulary of “gift” and “gratitude” has been enriched.

So has my appreciation for the way our loving prayers are a participation in God’s own life. For some time I have been intrigued by the ancient idea of “perichoresis,” the term first used by Gregory of Nazianzus to describe the mutual indwelling of the members of the Trinity. In John 17, Jesus prays that just as he is in the Father and the Father is in him, so believers will be in the Triune God and one with one another: “I in them and you in me.” The Trinity is a dynamic dance of the giving and receiving of love, and by grace we enter into that dynamism through the work of Christ.

Having been given back my life—as the prayers of hundreds of believers engaged in the life of the Triune God—I think that I have a better apprehension of what this means, which is not to say that I can describe it any better. It is finally a mystery, providentially underscored in my life in the season in which mysteries (and gifts and gratitude) abound.
”

— Ken Myers, in a letter sent to Mars Hill Audio listeners concerning his recovery from his heart attack last month.

December 06, 2011

William Eggleston, Untitled (Police Car, California).

December 05, 2011

December 05, 2011

Blair Kooistra’s picture of a westbound Milwaukee Road freight rumbling over the concrete arch viaduct in Rosalia, Washington. Here’s a view of the viaduct as it exists now.

December 02, 2011

Birmingham Is Not New York: 5 Cautions for Arts Ministry →

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