World
Taicha, Tenebrae and Corpus Christi
Dear Family and Friends: I don’t know if you have ever seen a child without a face.
The Living Jesus and the “Monk’s Alphabet”
Jesus had a way of looking at things that was very far from the ordinary, even contradictory to common sense.
All of his careful teachings and powerful examples served the purpose of helping us to see clearly, to understand, and to discern as if our lives depended on it, because they do. Even beyond the grave.
Quintessential Mesopotamian Protests
My old friend Charlie Keil emailed me–“See why you like Kanan Makiya. Love those lions.”–after he read Makiya’s recent piece in the Kenyon Review, “The Dying Lion.”
(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue
First contributor Ty Geltmaker steered your editor to “The Life of Gad Beck”—a graphic biography of a gay Jewish hero who fought Nazis in Germany during World War II (and survived). (The image below is from the body of the work…)
None Dare Call it a Sex Scandal
TV Diary III: “My Brilliant Friend”
Laurie Stone posted on My Brilliant Friend–the TV adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novels—as each episode appeared. Here are her responses to the final shows of the season…
Homegoing & Tom DeMott’s Hidden Obit
I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…