An essay to wake you up. Wiman tells the tense story of growing up in West Texas and his friend's hunting accident, which might've been his own. He writes about about faith with an intellectual edge and dry tone that is anything but dull.
Selected Readings
Selected Readings
by Vigen Guroian
"I once said that gardening began when God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise. I was wrong. What I should have said is that after the first couple greedily consumed beauty, gardening got inextricably mixed up with labor and survival, and farming came into existence."
by Vigen Guroian
When Adam gardened, he imitated his Maker in a purely recreative act of cultivation and care. He did not need to subdue the earth in order for it to yield fruit. Rather, the plants were Adam's palette, and the earth was his canvas. There was nothing but delight in the Garden, for Eden itself means "garden of delight."
by Vigen Guroian
All summer a leafed canopy kept out the sun and left the path safe and secluded. It is the kind of place where children might play hide-and-seek, or Adam and Eve conceal themselves from God. On this day, however, I, in my middle years, all soiled and weary, ambled down it, playing a timeless gardener's game, imagining what beauty there might be in spring when the flowers bloomed. As I reached the bottom, it was as if I had entered a house of light. The walls were not solid, and the powder-blue sky was its dome. But the temple was tangible, nonetheless, in sheer luminescence; and Hungry Run flowed through it like a silver thread.
by Vigen Guroian
"Lilies and hyacinths signify the resurrection, and I can understand why. But I have a pair of turtles that plant themselves in my garden each fall like two gigantic seeds and rise on Easter with earthen crowns upon their humbled heads."
by Vigen Guroian
Two characters of modern literature in whom one finds a radical disjunction of agape and eros are Flannery O'Connor's Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov. Both suffer from similar spiritual maladies. Both are haunted by a yearning for a transfigured world against which their reason rebels.
Read The New Yorker article on brainstorming that Rex Jung and Krista discussed in the show, which includes discussion of MIT's Building 20.
In response to a gathering at Westmont College exploring the role of science in liberal arts education, Mr. Gates develops his ideas on how how the sciences help us understand the value and meaning of our lives.
Physicists have long sought to describe the universe in terms of equations. In this article, S. James Gates explains how research on a class of geometric symbols known as adinkras could lead to fresh insights into the theory of supersymmetry — and perhaps even the very nature of reality.
We've pulled together some of our favorite columns by Nicholas Kristoff - columns on subjects ranging from evangelicals to oppression of women to philosophy to sweat shops and sex trafficking.
