The preacher said a couple of weeks ago that the sea has always been a symbol of chaos. Last night, I went surfing. Not just for the fun of it. It's time for the annual ramp up toward my January class, that audacious thing having to do with a "Christian Aesthetic", whatever that might …
Thoughtful Creatives, Resonance, and Hospitality
This past weekend was a game-changer. At the end of a pretty bumpy road just outside of Cle Elum sits a place called Chalet Talley, and there I spent a couple of days in the company of dear friends I'd never met before. It began with a ninety minute ride from Seattle with a …
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A Poem by Milosz
Reading poetry by Czeslaw Milosz this morning, and the concreteness of his writing calls me out of my head into the freshness of the humid morning. I found this poem at the Nobel Prize site. ------ Encounter We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. …
A Call for Syllabus Ideas
The title of the university class is this: The Arts and Culture: A Christian Aesthetic. It’s in January, is one week long, 8-5 for five days straight, beginning Monday, and there’s a two-three hour final on Friday afternoon. I’ve been teaching this class for ten years, a couple of years on my own, and the …
Sacred vs. Secular
Here's a question...help me out here: we use the terms "sacred" and "secular" to categorize certain events, phenomenon, and experiences. Skipping the obvious, that these can be helpful categories in distinguishing various lens' by which we see the world, how do you define, and differentiate between, "sacred" and "secular"? Are they helpful distinctions, or should …
JEFF BERRYMAN 