My annual round up of music.
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SPU’s Camp Casey
Visiting Whidbey Island
SPU’s Camp Casey is one of my favorite places in the whole world.
Read MoreMusic/ 2022
The Year of our Lord 2022 in music.
Read MoreA Few from England
I brought my camera this time, so I could share with you some of the highlights.
Read MoreTrollope on the Critical Class
In the opening chapters of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, Lady Carbury, sends the following letter
Read MoreThe Ride Home
A gathering of my radio appearances on WORD-FM with John and Kathy.
Read MorePop Goes the Culture
What is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date?
Read MoreMusic/ 2021
My annual round-up of the music that shaped the year.
Read MoreLiterature and Faith
I love the course because it allows me to talk about my favorite things: poetry and Christianity. But also I love how much is possible under those headings.
Read MoreFestus Endorsements
Philip James Bailey’s first poem was met with some rather excitable Victorian admirers.
Read MoreShakespeare on Salvation
What is evident about YHWH from at least as far back as the Abraham-Isaac story, is that He is perfectly comfortable disturbing the narrative from without.
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The Getaway: A Wedding Memory
The getaway vehicle was going to be a Bentley, but we moved out wedding date over a few days and so he asked would a white Rolls Royce be alright with me? Yes, I assured him, a Rolls Royce would be fine.
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Visiting Seattle
My first few visits to Seattle, I didn’t go the right places.
Read MoreWhy I Smell So Good
As with other forms of beauty, I've been interested in the aesthetic of smells for most of my life.
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Year in Review 2020
Amid so much that was bad, so many lives lost and also so much life—graduations missed and readings and concerts cancelled, careers stalled, businesses shuttered—there was, nevertheless this year much to rejoice.
Read MoreA Biography, in Brief
It occurs to me that some people want more than the pithy, dust-jacket style biographies on offer on minimalist websites. We want to know about poets, our professors! Or at least I do.
Read MoreWays to Wait: more thoughts on Advent
I wanted to offer here a little more evidence for why I think we should consider Advent a time of joyous anticipation rather than one of solemnity, mostly for the unconvinced.
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photo by David Wittig, as always
Let Them Eat Cake: A Wedding Memory
I don’t know what happened to damage Amazing Mike’s sense of consistency—let’s sell incredible cakes from the ugliest storefront imaginable! Let’s have pretty cakes taste like cardboard and plain one’s taste like ecstasy!—but I’m glad it did.
Read MoreTeach me to Curse
That’s not only adjacent to his English degree, or a case of his “using his degree” in a novel manner unplanned for by its architects; it’s straight down the middle of the plate. Mulaney does exactly the things we professors of English train people to do. But what’s odd to me is that he uses those skills to say the people who gave them to him conveyed no value.
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The Slow Road
Down the Coast in Corona-tide
Road Trip 2020
I love every bit of Washington, but my does Oregon have us beat when it comes to beaches. I was not at all expecting such light, such shapes, such arrangements of space.
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