December 2010
4 posts
Merry Christmas →
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Miscellany: KtB, Patrol, TheOoze, and Worship...
I wanted to say hi to everyone making their way here via the link in Issue 2 of Generate. What a beautiful piece of work that journal is. Great work, Generate.
I went to the Killing The Buddha Tin Anniversary show last week. It was great to meet editors I’ve worked with virtually and l look forward to working with again.
In case you haven’t seen it, the new version of TheOoze has...
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There We Were, Now Here We Are
Wow. It’s really been 8 months since I’ve been on tumblr. Some things happened along the way.
I started writing a new novel.
I reconsidered everything.
I got interested in the contemplative tradition.
I started my second year in the MFA.
I started writing more short stories.
I stopped caring.
I started caring.
I joined with some others in starting a new spiritual community.
...
April 2010
6 posts
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Fonts and Themes Part II (and Comments)
I wanted to thank Court for his comment on the last post. I’m going to experiment with some different themes and work on the ultralite issue when I get a chance. One of the problems with switching themes is that the comments don’t seem to be carrying over. So, until I get that figured out, the really great comments people have been leaving over the past few days might not show up....
Fonts and Themes
I love the ultralite theme for tumblr. It’s my favorite. But it seems like some browsers render the text in hard-to-read ways? Any suggestions?
Holy Saturday, 2010
Love love love that Stuart Murdoch song below. So good. I’m not saying it’s about Holy Saturday, per se, but I am saying I love it.
Last night I went to a Good Friday service and got into a discussion about what some theologians call the hypostatic union of Christ’s supposed two natures. The idea that Christ had two full natures, one human, one divine, has a long history in...
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Good Friday 2010, Part II
Thanks everyone for reading the KtB post or for reading and commenting on Huffington (there’s a good discussion brewing there).
I also want to thank a dear friend of mine for making me thing about something: In my provisional Christianity, is the overwhelming burden I feel a spiritual anxiety of hopelessness or homelessness?
I don’t know how my piece reads to the people who...
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Good Friday and Killing the Buddha
I’m grateful for the opportunity I was given to write today’s Good Friday feature at Killing the Buddha. If you’re not familiar with the story from which this magazine’s name derives, click on the link and read the manifesto section. I want to thank the editors, especially Ashley Makar: Thank you very, very much for working with me and for a venue like KtB. If you...
March 2010
22 posts
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Palm Sunday, 2010
Where I’ve been this week:
Writing a personal narrative to pitch to The New York Times. I workshopped it yesterday. I still have some work to do, but I’m confident in the direction. I might blog about the process on chriscocca.com when it’s done.
Revising a blog for Killing The Buddha. I’m behind on that one but hope to finish it today.
Thinking about my next HuffPo...
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Monday, March 22, 2010
Full disclosure: most of this post is also up at chriscocca.com.
A phote of mine (above) has been published at Dogzplot. When I got home from taking the picture last fall, I wrote this:
What scandal, these Moravians, these Peace Church nuns and friars rending martial banners? Duke Pulaski, their protector, marches to Savannah, is recalled in Illinois among the Polish and in the frontier...
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Sunday, March 21, 2010
Lately, I’m getting to the end of the day too beat to write with much of a narrative voice. It’s not because I’m not still writing throughout the day…it’s because I’m writing so much throughout the day. Different styles and forms for different formats and goals: blogs, the novel, narrative essays, comments. Speaking of comments, consider leaving some here,...
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Yesterday
I meant to post this yesterday, but you can check out my first piece as a Huffington Post religion blogger here. I’m excited to do more. I’m also working through another piece for Killing The Buddha that I hope will be ready soon.
It’s been really good to connect with new people via HuffPo…I hope to be able to do more of that there, here, and on Wordpress. Balancing that...
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Friday, March 19, 2009
Hi friends.
I don’t want to say too much about my time at the cemetery just yet. What my son can understand never ceases to amaze me. Being at the Italian cemetery made me want to share this amazing piece by Ferlinghetti: The Old Italians Dying
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Some odds and ends today:
I just got back from spending some time with good friends in St. Patrick’s honor. The picture in the previous post is from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin that I took when my wife and I visited Ireland.
On a wall outside there are memorials to many of Ireland’s famous writers including Jonathan Swift and Samuel Beckett. Oscar Wilde’s boyhood home isn’t far...
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Monday, March 15, 2010
Another miss today. My wife commandeered the newly-fixed Mac for work-related necessities.
One thing about keeping up this blog on a daily basis: it’s totally cut out my time at the gym. I’m finding that I really need that hour or hour and half of physical exertion back. It helps me sleep and keeps me healthy and agreeable. Cardio, medicine ball, sauna. I need it.
I write a lot...
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
It’s been almost two years since my Pop died. I’ve been meaning to get back to his story for some time now. Maybe thinking about him is making me think about entropy, about the problem of evil and suffering. Maybe it’s the recent earthquakes which remind me that we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds.
You may know about Gottfried Leibniz. He said that...
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Mac is kind-of fixed. I wonder if this is what I get for unfollowing @GodsMac on twitter. No offense, @GodsMac — it was just time to pare down my personal account. The battery is consumed, which is another way of saying dead. I was almost double the number of cycles covered by the warranty. The AC adapter was a separate issue, and the Genius Bar hooked me up with a free fix because...
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Update from yesterday
I missed yesterday because of the computer issues.
I hope to get those fixed today. Next: adventures from the Apple Store?
How faith is like Mac OS? (By the way, why have no end-times enthusiasts made the observation that Windows XP basically co-opts the Chi Rho symbol? )
I had a really good conversation about religion last night. Though it’s occurred to me before, it occurred to me in...
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Warning: Theodicy fail.
It always fails.
More specifically, I can’t post today. My streak is about to be broken because of technical difficulties. My MacBook will not hold a charge for anything. Worse, the adapter is being unhelpfully sensitive. I think one of the prongs is messed up (and I think these issues are related). This is the second time in probably four months that I’ve...
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
I think* I’ve enabled comments on this blog. They’re powered by disqus, but you shouldn’t need a disqus account to use the interface. This all seems to be working in Firefox. The fonts seem off in Safari. If anyone is rocking Chrome or IE and can tell me how everything looks, that would be great. I really love the Ultralite theme I’m using (mostly because it reminds me...
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Monday, March 8, 2010
I wrote a different 1000 words a few hours ago, but I can’t post them yet. I’m hoping they’ll surface soon. Stay tuned on that. Some news coming, I think.
I’ve heard from two people that they’re not able to access orthoproxy.tumblr.com/ask without being a tumblr member. I thought that was a glitch but maybe I’m wrong? Can other other tumblrs confirm or...
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Sunday, March 7, 2010
It’s hard to believe I’m already 22 days into this project. 22 posts, probably something like 21,000 words, 22 days without missing. If you’ve been following along, thanks so much for being a part of it. And if you’ve just started reading, likewise. Free free to drop me a note at orthoproxy.tumblr.com/ask or on twitter @orthoprox.
I’ve been thinking this week...
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Saturday, March 6, 2010
I could write about the Bible for hours. I’ve been doing a lot of that here over the last few days. Today feels like a good day to return to the narrative. The sun is out. It’s 50 degrees in Allentown. My heart is full of spring. It occurs to me as I type this that any time we seek to situate ourselves in a context, we’re really asking to be understood on our own in terms and...
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Friday, March 5, 2010
I really believe what I said yesterday about the Bible. I really am confounded by this whole idea of authority and orthodoxy and holy writ. It’s not that I’m some kind of hedonist or libertine. It’s just that, as I’ve said in one way or another here, the idea that the God of the cosmos, the God that Christians say made everything, the God they say is immanent and living...
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
I occasionally come across job listings for positions in the kind of churches I used to think I’d like to work in. Sometimes, through friends on twitter, facebook, and elsewhere, I come across news about new faith communities that interest me. Many of these are in the “emerging” or “emergent” stream of current Christianity, and many operate with assumptions about...
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Wednesday, March 3, 2010
I ended yesterday’s post suggesting a connection between Mormonism’s grounding in a proclaimed religious artifact and the emerging fundamentalism of certain evangelical strains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I think there’s something to that, but I probably need to say that we who study these things typically cast the rise of concepts like scriptural inerrancy as a...
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Barry Hannah and The Maddening Protagonist →
I’m not in the habit posting links here, but go read this. For real.
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Tuesday, March 2, 2010
I keep saying that we believe the things we believe because of our relationships, that we cede authority on any number of matters to a wide matrix of people we trust. These are people we know personally and strangers we think of experts, people whose relational or academic credentials qualify them, in effect, to speak for us. Like any decent skeptic, I wonder about these qualifications. ...
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Monday, March 1, 2010
Happy March 1 and Happy Monday. Three weeks until Spring. Most of the snow still left in my front yard now constitutes two creatures my son and I built yesterday. They are surrounded by grass and make me think of those great (old?) Calvin & Hobbes collections. The Winter Olympics are over. Pitchers and catchers are reporting. It’s the second week of Lent. I realized today that...
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Sunday, February 28, 2010
Today I’m going to have to cheat a little. My wife has a big push at work and is doing some things from home. It’s easier for her to use my MacBook than the old clunky desktop, mostly because that piece of equipment is actually currently dismantled in the coal room.
Speaking of the coal room, one the coolest things about living in an old half-twin in the city is this little part of...
February 2010
15 posts
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Saturday, February 27, 2010
I like to go for beer and wings at this bar in Bethlehem with friends. A few weeks ago I told a story in that context that I didn’t expect to. I don’t know that I expected to tell it here, either, but I’m going to. I’ve been talking for two or three thousands words about the idea of church/liturgy/religion as game. I think that for many people, that’s an apt...
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I’m going to publish today’s official post soon, but as I type this, the Pacific tsunami is anticipated in perhaps a full one quarter of the world.
There’s going to be a post here soon about evil and entropy. Suffice it to say for now that from where I sit (safely removed from the physical impact of this event), this is not the best of all possible worlds. If you’re not...
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Friday, February 26, 2010
I said yesterday that there may be some provisional good to be had from religious structures that provide sets of rules and expectations we can follow with rote familiarity. There are stories from many fields of breakthroughs being made while the active mind rests or performs menial tasks, and I think I’m getting at the same thing. It might seem counter-intuitive, but many people seem to...
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
A few housekeeping notes today before we get down to our 1000 words of business. I really, really love OmmWriter. I use it like a white noise machine to write to and it’s also replaced the Laid album by James as my preferred sleep aid. I don’t have a stake in the company, but it’s a great free tool. Track 4 seems to be the best. I usually like to post each day’s entry...
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Behind The Nylon Curtain
You know about where I live because of Billy Joel. I just have to say it. There it is. Allentown, Pennsylvania, how can I describe you? The things Billy Joel said about you and the Lehigh Valley as a whole are true. It’s been 28 years since that single from The Nylon Curtain, but here we are again. Here we are still. There are no new factories. There is no new manufacturing. This is...
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010
I said yesterday that when God shows up in our religious customs, it’s because God deigns to meet us where we are. Our church calenders and spiritual disciplines and liturgies don’t create kairos, but they do provide some time, some refuge, some respite, and sometimes kairos happens. When I was in college, the staff worker with our chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship...
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Monday, February 22, 2010
“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
- Douglas Hofstadter Today begins the first full week of Lent. The word comes from the German Lenz, which means “spring.” Last year I had a poem called Not With Easter Lilies up at TheOoze.com. I want to share it here, not because I finally like the odd, place-bound...
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Sunday, February 21, 2010.
The fellowship meal after Paul’s funeral was one of the first times most of Lorraine’s grandchildren were all together in one place as adults, sitting around her like the Last Supper. Some people laugh at funerals because of nerves or tension, for relief, and some people laugh because they’re so damned tired of crying. Lorraine and Paul were each other’s second spouses. ...
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Saturday, Februrary 20, 2010
The other thing about 1984 is that I remember feeling lucky for having six grandparents when I thought everyone else had four. I guess I knew that there were some kids who didn’t have any, and if I would have stopped to think about it I would have realized that some of my cousins had seven if I’m counting right. But I grew up with six until I was eight and my grandfather from...
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Friday, February 19, 2010
This is the followup to Wednesday’s post. Disclosure: It goes 200 words over my stated 1000 word cap.
I feel like I keep saying Divinity School. Divinity School, Divinity School, Divinity School. Two posts ago, I said that I’m not one of those people who became a Christian in college, that this isn’t one of those stories. I’m also not one of those people who lost my faith in seminary or...
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A Lenten Interlude
This isn’t properly a follow up to yesterday’s post, but I wanted to write and share it today. As always, see previous for context.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and, like I sometimes do, I found myself panging. A brief etymology of that verb as I mean to use it: When I was in Divinity School, we all used to get our lunch in a commissary area called the Refectory. The Refectory...
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In The Beginning
(see previous posts for context).
For two short periods in my life, I was paid to think about what it is we think about when we think about God. It’s not what I saw myself doing when I was kid (professional baseball player or rock star) or a teenager (political columnist and consultant). But somewhere between leaving home for college and leaving college for Divinity School, my plans and...
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Prologue
(see “About” post for first thoughts and context.)
I started this blog because I felt like I needed a neutral zone to write about the kinds of things I used think I’d spend my life exploring professionally. I don’t know where it will go or what it will be, but telling you a bit more about myself seems like a good place to start.
Since graduating from Yale Divinity School in...
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About
I turned thirty this year, and, inspired by Conan O’Brien’s “work hard, be kind” speech, I’ve decided to leave cynicism squarely in my twenties. There are many good reasons to by cynical about a great many things, but the funk cynicism as a system leaves in my mouth can border on debilitating. Maybe amazing things really do happen if you work hard and are kind, and maybe they don’t. In any...