Category: articles
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Brene Brown’s Definition of Shame is Ignorant
Update 5/22/19: sometimes I use strong language that doesn’t age well simply because for posts like this, I tend to write quickly, with affirmative, assertive syntax. I wrote quickly, affirmatively, assertively in this post on Brene Brown’s definition of shame and some of it aged poorly. Though I still believe she ought to consider aiming…
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Communes — from 58 poems written at 29
The phone flings beeps, fingers respond By typing tamely, or the thumbs clanking I love you in animated Golden age .gifs or emojis Like knot-tying nubs that fumble. Half-hitches the harbor uses In the nightly fog. We never meant To replace our prose with power cords Or whisper with widgets. Where did the letters Get…
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In Which I Nearly Died
For six months of 2015, my wife and I wondered if I was going to die. And then during a few months in 2016, we wondered some more. Here’s the story in which I nearly died: It started with a vasovagal episode in early summer. In case you’ve never encountered a vasovagal episode, here’s what…
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Seven Foods that Saved My Life
Tara and I have pulled one another along in the boldness of various faiths — of the inconveniences, rightly considered — that force us to consider ourselves aright and help me, for one, stand as tall as a man can stand and no taller. Several years ago she asked if we could spend a month eating…
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Eugene Peterson and His All Out War on the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Often we hear historians say that the greatest critiques of the church come from the radicals inside her. Eugene Peterson has fit this bill for years, pastoring pastors on how to pastor instead of coddling and enabling them to stay in their addictions to greed and power and graceful lusts and fame. I’m reminded of…
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Good Criticism is Hard
Recently, I had a conversation with my friend and brother Doug Welch about good criticism. Since the conversation, I’ve been meditating on everything that makes good criticism and deep reflection difficult. Doug always pushes me to think harder, broader, deeper, further — if I’ve ever added anything helpful to the critical and reflective world, the seeds of those contributions were…
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The Wild West — from 58 poems written at 29
The Wild Wild West is what they call Baltimore’s broken — the battered western End of The East. With Indians murdered, A white western needs rewritten as an Eastern In this city’s sinning. For soon The Black Man is made a modern native And Manifest Destiny masquerades As eminent domain. Even the firemen Ponder the plastic…
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drDOCTOR Issue 001 :: Winter 2017
Our friends Luke Wiget, Sam Farahmand, and Mila Jaroniec started the drDOCTOR reading series in Bushwick a few years back. Then they turned it into a kind of long-form, rambly-yet-somehow-profound podcast. Then an online zine. Now they’re doing a print run. And it’s handsome. And it includes the raw tapes of a Kurt Cobain interview. A world…
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Locusts — from 58 poems at 29
How did it happen? How did the most Important point and poem of sound In our day indict dapper slices Of itself and shrink slowly to the noice Of phones buzzing? Petty to trade The cuckoo clock or the bells Of the belfry tower at the best hours Of vigils and vespers or the violin…
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Ash Wednesday — from 58 poems written at 29
It was the palm’s power to pick the one Who would have the honor. Healers and kings And prophets and priests enpalmed like the actors Who ready for the road of red carpet And the fanning of fans’ fingers and extra — EXTRA! — Excerpts from the excess paper Runs The Register or rather The…
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Giving Up Reading News — from 58 poems written at 29
…is harder than hearing. How you shatter Bones as a boy before the season Ends and you ache to even the score And return to the team, or take a sick Gardener’s groaning for the great outdoors Or a landlocked lady of the water Or a shut-in sailor. Soon you will find the lane to…
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Vanilla — from 58 poems written at 29
Vanilla bean never annunciates tastes So great as when the grave gravity of beer Powers it in its wake like a primed river Boat or a barge or beluga whales Who wave at the sea and wake the deep In the slash of that split spade of leather And blubber and blowholes. It breaks the…