"Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… [to] look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted."
Over the last weekend, I hopped on Skype again with my buddies Geoff, Jonny, and Kyle and recorded another episode of our "podcast" — still under the current working title “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a nod to Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” I want to strenuously reiterate: None of us have ever made a "podcast" before and …
Continue reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a “Podcast”: Episode 2
Yeah! [Winter] really is beautiful, isn't it? But it's so white. You know, how about a little color? I'm thinking like maybe some crimson, chartreuse. How about yellow? -- Olaf, in Frozen (2013) Hello again! I hope you enjoyed parts 1 and 2 of this monumental and slightly insane 4-part series on winter landscape painting. …
My soul look back and wonder How did I make it over -- Mahalia Jackson, "How I Got Over" Y’all, I know it may be strange for me to say as a half-American middle-class white kid in 2021—and I hope it doesn’t conjure images of Craig in that classic “Juneteenth” episode of Atlanta—but one of …
Continue reading 40 of My Favorite African-American Spirituals, Folk, and Freedom Songs
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at an antiwar demonstration in New York in April 1967, with Dr. Benjamin Spock to his right. In my previous post I linked the little reflection I wrote to commemorate MLK Day. In that reflection, I referenced a famous antiwar speech MLK gave late in his life—the “Beyond …
We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.– Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” Hey folks! I hope you all had a good long weekend (if it applies) and are generally doing well these days. I can’t believe we’ve finally reached the last full day …
Hey folks! I hope you enjoyed part 1 of this 4-part series from a couple days ago. I've now finished compiling part 2. I'm going to go ahead and repost most of my introduction from the first post providing some background for this weird project. The paintings follow. Here you go: [M]y latest obsession—as odd …
Look, I've never made a podcast, never been on a podcast, and generally don't listen to podcasts. But I do miss talking to my friends, most of whom are scattered to the four corners of the earth. I also enjoy talking about interesting topics — politics, current events, art, music, literature, pop culture, high culture, …
Continue reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a “Podcast”: Episode 1
Happy 2021, folks! I don't know about you, but I'm definitely feeling a great swell of hope and gratitude as we move forward into this new year, with its promise of vaccines, a reopened economy, and rekindled friendships and community ties. Fingers crossed! Anyway, as many of you know, I have a bit of an …
Grasping at Awes 