Survivors in Church: A Preamble Welcome to the first post in a multi-part series about trauma survivors in the church. Topics will include common triggers in the church environment and their effects on survivors’ participation; how the church’s beliefs, particularly its picture of human nature, can either be healing or re-traumatizing; pastoral care for survivors;
Survivors in Church: Between Covenant and Choice Read More »
I’m pleased to share the latest installment in the “City Elegy” series of prose-poems by my prison pen pal “Conway”. I was particularly struck by the metaphors he uses to describe the Los Angeles streetscape. That’s first-class noir. As I interpret the line about the “confidential lunatic’s serenade”, he’s alluding to the confidential “evidence” that
New Poetry by Conway: “City Elegy V” Read More »
Charlie Bondhus’s masterful, heart-wrenching new poetry collection, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), could not have been written in any previous generation. In the closeted centuries following the Greco-Roman era, the poetry of gay male love and the poetry of war have only been permitted to overlap in sublimated and metaphorical
Charlie Bondhus: War Poet for the Post-DADT Era Read More »
As a fiction writer and a person of faith, I can be stymied by worries over what is “real” versus “in my head”. Where is the line that separates fictional archetypes and imaginative projections from a genuine encounter with an unseen deity, and what distinguishes both of those experiences from the voices heard by the
Trust Your Imaginary Friends, and Don’t Scare the Horses Read More »
This year, I resolved to lose 200 pounds. Of books. We are surgically attached to our iPhones in this house, so much so that Shane’s first instance of imaginative play was holding a block up to his ear and pretending to talk to it. However, I haven’t been able to warm up to reading e-books.
Thoughts from the Great Book Purge of 2014 Read More »