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 …

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” again…

Mercia Eliade, one of the most important voices in comparative religious studies, said that humans don't get to make the call about what's sacred and what isn't.   The gods decide.   Humans work to discover sacred space, but it's the gods who lead them there. The Hebrew notion of being holy means "to be set apart."  …

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 …