This week in my religion course we read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon this Rock,” about his RV trip to the Creation Festival, and Matthew Teague’s “The Aftermath,” reporting in the wake of the murder of five Amish girls, “an event with no meaning.” Both brilliant. And it had not occurred to me before this week, before talking with […]
Weeks ago, an essay by the writer George Saunders appeared on the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner: “My Writing Education: A Timeline.” Everyone I knew was reading it. Everyone I didn’t know seemed to be reading it. I waited. And waited. And now it’s my late-weekend reading. A wish for my writing students: Make it your late-weekend reading, too. […]
This week in my David Foster Wallace seminar, we read his 2007 essay “Just Asking,” originally published in The Atlantic and now included in his collection Both Flesh and Not. (We complemented the reading with Maria Bustillos’s Awl essay, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” which is published in a different form in a 2014 collection I edited, Gesturing Toward […]
Students in my religion writing class read an excerpt this week, published in Harper’s, from Marilynne Robinson’s Home. A companion piece was a 2012 essay by Paul Elie, published in The New York Times Sunday book review, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” In Elie’s essay, he makes use of Flannery O’Connor’s claim from a half-century ago that “the struggle ‘to make belief believable’ [was] the […]
This past week in my David Foster Wallace seminar, we read the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” and watched the film Lost Highway, the ostensible subject of the essay. We had difficult conversations about the movie; we had a hard time putting into words what was going on on-screen. According to Dennis Lim, in this […]
I asked my religion class to write about the appeal of the apocalypse, to use an image or video or song as a way into explaining what they think. Here’s a video about the end of the world by the band Matt & Kim; it’s a break-up song.
I’ve encouraged my students to listen to a conversation recorded last month between President Obama and the writer Marliynne Robinson, whose work we’re reading in class over these weeks—in particular, an excerpt from her novel Home published in Harper’s and an essay she wrote for The American Scholar, “Onward, Christian Liberals.” The second installment of her conversation with the President appears today online. Photo […]
This week in my religion class we’re reading essays by Marilynne Robinson, Francine Prose, and Nathan Schneider (whom I’ve mentioned in this portfolio before). The readings find great accompaniment in a recent conversation about democracy and faith and history between Robinson and President Obama, recorded in Des Moines, Iowa, last month and published by The New York Review of Books. […]
This weekend I’ll be reading D.T. Max’s Guardian story about why it’s a bad idea to “worship” David Foster Wallace as a secular saint. Strange how this story relates so well to both my seminar on Wallace and my religion writing course. The image here is discussed briefly in Max’s story. It’s a painting by Paolo Beneforti.
In my writing class today we looked at images from the poems of Christian Wiman and Edward Hirsch. I asked all my students to find an image they’re drawn to and try to write a description that packs the image with meaning. In his poem “Five Houses Down,” Wiman describes a “wonder-cluttered porch.” Here’s one of those […]
