In 2016 I embarked on a journey to read through the entire Bible, which I hadn’t attempted in over a decade.
I made a deal with the middle school class in our congregation. If I did it, they would do it.
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The Obama Era: A Christian’s Reflection
By the time Barack Obama was about to be elected, I had just enrolled in a Master’s program in English, having grown up around conservatives and now surrounded by liberals. I had a respect for both Republicans and Democrats and their differing perspectives, but didn’t feel like either one. I’ll never forget the emerging polarization as Obama was elected: the celebration and the grief. Obama’s presidency is the first I witnessed since coming to a political maturity. Under his presidency, and my college education, I learned the depth and complexity of American politics and culture.
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My Short Story, “The Calvinist,” Published in Liminoid Magazine
First publication of the new year!
Liminoid Magazine has published my piece of short fiction, “The Calvinist,” in their winter issue.
Read it for free here.
“If he runs, he ends, and if he ends he has ended. The other him is safe at home, his uniform is being washed, and he is complacent at the table, returning to the plate again and again and again. While the shirtless children chase the wingless birds that cannot fly.”
Seamus Heaney’s “The Haw Lantern” at Christmas Time
Our first Christmas together as a couple my wife gave me Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s collection of poems, The Haw Lantern. Reading the title poem, I was drawn by the imagery of fruit and dying light in winter, and and I thought of Christmas tree lights, but knew that the reference to Diogenes meant something else was going on than a cute comparison of two plants. Years later, I open the book again and turn to the poem, drawing a light on how the poem has grown on me, what fruit it now bears. Continue reading
Joseph’s Plans for Mary
He was a faithful Jewish man from a little town of Nazareth, engaged to a faithful Jewish woman. She was a graceful and humble young woman. She was shocked to hear from an angel that she would bear the child who would be the Messiah. Not only was she a nobody in the world, but she was a virgin, and would not marry for several months. Conception was impossible! What if people thought she had betrayed her fiancé, or slept with him before the wedding? But the Spirit would be upon her, God would protect her, and the Son would be born trough her.
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Listen to Christmas Music (NOT Rush Limbaugh)
The other day I was getting a little tired of Christmas music in my car and began browsing radio stations until I turned to hear a familiar voice that always made me cringe a little.
Rush “the disinfotainer” Limbaugh.
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Graphic the Valley—Review
graphic: giving a vivid picture with explicit details,
or rocks having a surface texture resembling cuneiform writing
It was a book I came across in a discount store for a dollar. it was worth more than a dollar. Graphic the Valley by Peter Hoffmeister is a rarity that somehow flew under the radar. In short, it’s the story of Samson loosely retold as the story of a modern American Indian young man living in Yosemite Valley.
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#LukeCageMatters
Marvel’s Luke Cage on Netflix is not your typical comics-to-screen project. It contains heavier amounts of profanity (including the first Marvel use of the “n word”). It takes place in Harlem. It gets heavily political, rather than merely nodding to current events. And it feels very real.
The Victorian Legacy of Harry Potter
It began with a boy with a lightning bolt on his forehead on a train. And just as the idea came to Rowling, a Dickensian novel could have started out like this: a little orphan boy with a mark on his face being laid at the door of some snobbish middle class brick-heads.
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The Avett Brothers’ True Sadness in Roanoke—concert (and album) Review 11-19-16
Now what? The Avetts have gone everything now, but they did so slowly. Chart their last three albums, and you can tell they have merged from a heavy rock-centered bluegrass band into a more electric, pop-centered, all-American band. But they didn’t sell out after one or two original albums. They re-centered themselves naturally after half a dozen of the work they first came to be known for. They haven’t lost touch with their roots.
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CALEB COY 