Daniel Taylor's Blog, page 4

Is The Great Gatsby a Crime Novel? What Makes Good Fiction Good?

Is The Great Gatsby a crime novel? Crime and Punishment? Moby Dick? See my reflections on what makes good fiction good at the Image journal blog: http://www.imagejournal.org/2015/09/1...

BLUE-COLLAR SHEPHERDS CHECK OUT THE CHRIST

(The following is a brief reflection on the shepherds in the Christmas story, as delivered at a Christmas Eve service at my church.)
Christmas time and shepherds calls up a picture of poor saps in bathrobes and fake beards looking adoringly at a plastic baby in a fake manger. (Present company excepted.) What I think it should call up instead is admiration for Christianity’s first evangelists and a determination on our part to tell the story of the good news with as much passion and joy as they did.
A few things ...

UPDIKE LEFT HIS BEST SELF AT HOME

“I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” So says the late John Updike, famous writer who spent his adult life on the east coast but here claims that he left his best self back where he grew up. There’s a lot to ponder in this one sentence. I’ll just fly by a bit of it.
He is talking, among other things, about home. Home is not primarily a place—otherwise those of us who had many different ...

FERGUSON—A “Yes, but” STORY

Most everyone seems to know what to think about Ferguson. I don’t.
It’s one of those “yes, but” stories—in which every assertion about it is answered with a “yes, but” that, if not exactly the opposite, is meant to blunt the initial assertion. “Yes he was stoned and punched the cop in the face and went for his gun (maybe), but he didn’t get his gun and he fled and the cop could have waited for help instead of shooting him.” Or, “Yes, it is a tragedy and race might have ...

KURT VONNEGUT: JESUS-LOVING ATHEIST

I’m going to give this blog thing another try. My kids say, make it short, make it long, make it shallow, make it deep, but the one thing you must do, if you are going to blog at all, is make it regular. So I’m shooting for twice a week, even if it’s only “here’s what I read and thought briefly about five minutes ago.”
Dan Wakefield has an article I enjoyed in the latest IMAGE journal (a publication I highly encourage you to look into—no, subscribe to) about his long-time ...

A World Without the Disabled Will Be the Poorer

Hello. I hope to get back to making semi-regular posts to this blog. (I’ve been busy completing a novel!!-which will be published by Wipf and Stock near the end of this year). What follows is a longer version of an opinion piece I wrote for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper (it appeared on May 23 on the Opinions Exchange page, along with a nice photo of the young man who prompted it):
Grant Petersen was thrilled with his second place medal. While some of the players on the high school basketball team ...

On the Death of a Poet: RIP Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

We arrived in Ireland, a motley group of poetry lovers (some faking it), on the day in 1995 that it was announced that Seamus Heaney had won the Noble Prize for Literature. I first learned the news from handmade signs in shop windows, in English and Irish, that were variations on the theme “Well done Seamus!” The sense of shared achievement and pride was palpable. “He’s one of ours” was in the air. It made me want to live in a small country.
One could lament that this could not—absolutely could ...

LOVING OUR OH SO COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

More from Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss—a book that has something underlineable (not a word until now) on every page. So I’ll just pick one underlining at random: “Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience” (108-09). CS Lewis says something parallel when he talks about us treasuring the thing that keeps us from God because it is so familiar and comfortable. And I take my stab at exploring the phenomenon in The Skeptical ...

GOD’S CALL TO UNBELIEF?

I’m reading with pleasure the poet Christian Wiman’s memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. With a poet’s gift for fresh words to express old ideas (“the hive-like certainties of churches”), he ruminates over his unlikely return to faith after decades away. At one point he says, “Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.” I underlined the sentence, not sure whether it was quite right, but knowing he was on to something.
The maybe not quite right part for me is ...

GOD AS DJ: SENDING OUT THE MUSIC

Picking up where I left off in the last post, I want to expand a bit on a metaphor I came across a while back in reading Barbara Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. She talked to a lot of brain scientists, including many who believe that God and things of the spirit are entirely a creation of the human brain. She found a number of other scientists who didn’t think agree with this conclusion, however, and the metaphor she presented was of the brain ...