• Kevin was my featured poet today at ConversantLife.com; he also has a great new poem on his site.

• My multitalented friend Christy has an article at Comment, reflecting on the IAM conference and ways to be a creative catalyst in your community.

• Excellent article at Burnside Writers’ Collective on spiritual disciplines. It seems they are resurfacing at last in the younger evangelical and formerly-evangelical consciousness. I just reviewed a book for RELEVANT about the same ideas (see May/June issue).

We went to Rockwood Music Hall last night, after a dash around the Lower East Side trying to find food, and saw our friend Nate, a rockstar songwriter, play some old and some new songs. In the process we saw many friends (film people/singers/actors/writers), all of whom we’re seeing tonight again at the behest of Nate’s lovely Jenn. And tomorrow night, we are feeding chili to a handful of friends. Wish us luck.

Last night Tom had to work late (he got home around 12:30am, and had to be back up at 5am - good thing this job is nearing its end), so I nabbed Alisa and we headed to the U2 3D screening. Well! It was pretty awesome. It wasn’t gimmicky - more like you were watching everything on the highest-definition TV you can possibly imagine, but with image layering. If you don’t like Bono’s take on politics and religion, you probably would get annoyed by the concert - it is pretty preachy around the middle - but the music is sublime, and with a great set list (that included “Beautiful Day”, “Vertigo”, “Yahweh”, “With Or Without You”, and a bunch of other great ones). I hope more bands try this 3D concert thing. Very cool.

It’s Wednesday. We can get through it.

Now what? I love my job. I enjoy my students, I enjoy teaching at my college, I have the time to write, I feel that the work I’m doing is, in fact, pleasing to Him. He has blessed my life abundantly this past year. But over the past few months, I’ve started to ask a very, very challenging question: Is this how I can best use God’s gifts in His service?

As I prayed about this a few days ago, I came to understand why it’s a scary question for me. I realized that part of what I’m afraid of is—you guessed it—failure.

We live in a world impoverished of story; so it is not surprising that many of us have picked up the bad habit of extracting “truths” from the stories we read: we summarize “principles” that we can use in a variety of settings at our discretion; we distill a “moral” that we can use as a slogan on a poster or as a motto on our desk. We are taught to do this in our schools so that we can pass examinations on novels and plays. It is no wonder that we continue this abstracting, story-mutilating practice when we read our Bibles. “Story” is not serious; “story” is for children and campfires. So we continuously convert our stories into the “serious” speech of information and motivation. We hardly notice that we have lost the form, the form that is provided to shape our lives largely and coherently. Our spirituality-shaping text is reduced to disembodied fragments of “truth” and “insight”, dismembered bones of information and motivation . . .

It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible. Every sentence is embedded in story and can no more be understood accurately or fully apart from the story than any one of our sentences spoken throughout the course of the day can be understood apart from our relationships and culture and the various ways in which we speak to our children and parents, our friends and enemies, our employers and employees - and our God.

- Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

Now I can stop repeating myself on people’s blogs. Just go read this. He says everything.

“There is a surprising consistency between our founding intentions and where Taproot is at right now, thirty-one years later,” Nolte says. When you see one of Taproot’s shows, “it’s not about didactic measures or an altar call. It’s the delivery of a story and counting on the audience to be responsible enough or bothered enough that they’ll go away and sort through what the story had to say.”

Still hunting for an equivalent in New York. (Intriguingly, though, I recognized the article’s authors as Redeemer people right off the bat. So maybe we’re getting somewhere.)

She says a lot of great things about writing during the interview, but this particularly caught my eye:

Overstreet:

Do you think that faith makes you a different writer? Do you see connections between your spiritual convictions and your writing?

Zarr:

This kind of goes back to your question about the flaws and redeeming qualities in my characters. My understanding and experience of faith involves a compassionate and gracious God, who is also just. If I’m the creator and god of my own little universe of characters, I want to be compassionate, gracious, and just, too. Which means seeing realistically the flaws in each character, while also seeing their potential for good. The justice comes in when it comes to consequences of things characters do and say. I don’t pretend to understand how it all works on a theological level in real life, but it seems that sometimes God lets us experience consequences to their full effect, sometimes he softens the blow, and sometimes he shields us completely. So all those things are options for me in a story . . . as the all-powerful creator of my little world, I get to orchestrate things so that my characters, who I love, get to experience grace. I love that about writing, and I don’t think I’d be that kind of writer if that’s not how I saw and experienced my own faith.

Yes, yes, yes.