The Nightstand

Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family, partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless.

This is the story of a bruised soul touched by grace but still frustrated by the passivity that others continue to show in response to the unspeakable.

What Sanders offers might be called the imagination of hope—a means of acting to stem disaster.

Dunstan Thompson's poetic prayer reminds me how necessary Advent is and leaves me grateful for Christ’s work that makes his former foes members of his household.

Frank Mulder is preaching the same Gospel. Pictures of Frank Mulder make him look like he could be a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, on a bicycle, planting sycamores instead of apple trees, helping people, one by one, break free from the threefold madness of money, planning, and crowds.

Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself in the real, to feel awe at all that’s been given to you, and to consider living a life of creaturely gratitude and creativity.

There are second chances for some of us, but even second chances bring new losses. For me, it is the grace and hope of these stories and others like them in the work of Berry and Berger that has earned them pride of place on my shelves and in my life.

Brown stresses the need to pay attention to “what God has said, and nature is his most primordial and exoteric word”; after all, within this word, human nature is situated too. But “[l]ess and less in our time and place do we hear the most primordial of God’s words—the song, one might say, of creation’s fundamental realities”; “[w]e have lost the ability to speak and understand the language of creation.” Where might we look for a remedy to this hearing loss?

Chuck Marohn's work, whatever disagreements one may have with it, gives us some good counsel on where to start changing suburban-addicted minds and fiscal incentives.

... where human affairs are conducted as if place really matters, where economic affairs are conceived as if limits really matter, and where political power is exercised as if liberty really matters.