Band: Saintseneca
Last Saturday, my fiancée and I attended a concert headlined by Tigers Jaw and got to see Saintseneca as an opening act. Their name was familiar but it wasn't until I heard them live that I got hooked on their melding of Southern folk and alternative indie.
"River" by Saintseneca
Song: "Gainesville"
I came across this rockin' ode to the Fest of my college town by Dillinger Four on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
"Gainesville" by Dillinger Four
Article: Dying Universities and Living for Christ
I was forwarded the essay "The End of the University" and was struck how Roger Scruton writing in April 2015 about his experience teaching in the underground university of former Czechoslovakia speaks so much to the obstacles in engaging the political and academic square of late 2016 / early 2017 America.
And what was most interesting to me was the urgent desire among all my new students to inherit what had been handed down to them. They had been raised in a world where all forms of belonging, other than submission to the ruling Party, had been marginalized or denounced as crimes. They understood instinctively that a cultural heritage is precious, precisely because it offers a rite of passage into the thing that you truly are and the community of feeling that is yours.
And shameless plug: my fiancée has started a blog of her own at Domine, non sum dignus where she offers spiritual insights on living a Christ-centered life.
Podcast: Barron on Coen
The episode pair of Bishop Barron drawing out the spiritual themes interwoven in multiple Coen Brothers films was extremely enlightening. The first part ("The Spiritually Alert Coen Brothers") sees Bishop Barron identifies several Christ-figures in Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. In the second part ("Caesar, the Dude, and a Serious Man"), the good bishop is reaching but is still able to single out spiritual motifs in A Serious Man, The Big Lebowski, and Hail, Caesar!.
Scripture: Man carrying water
On Day 268 of my guide to read the Bible in a year, I came across the passage in Mark where Jesus gives instructions on where their Passover will be prepared. Jesus first tells two of His disciples to find a man carrying a jar of water. I couldn't shake out of my head an interpretation I heard long ago that the reason Jesus gave this specific instruction was probably because it would be a unique a peculiar sight given that water-carrying was a woman's job. This view didn't sit well with me because it seemed arbitrary on one extreme and crypto-feminist on another. But a visit to the Church Fathers via the Catena Aurea eased my soul with exegesis relating the man with the water as the servant to the master of the home, with the water to be used for drinking and washing (alluding to the living waters of Baptism and the washing of the feet) and the disciples Peter and John (who are identified in Luke) symbolizing the active and contemplative arms of the Church preparing the banquet table for the Institution of the Eucharist.
Be Thou My Vision,
Kelvin
No comments:
Post a Comment