reviews, etc.

It was a delight to praise a recent book to the skies in Speculum, and I look forward to responding to Erika Doss's Spiritual Moderns at CAA next month through ASCHA. Here are some new reviews of Mother of the Lamb and The Everlasting People. I have been asked to launch a column at Comment in the coming weeks, details to come.

Christmas #20

Indeed, two decades of millinerd are in the books. It's a substack world, but I expect to be the last blog standing. Here at headquarters, we're celebrating with the culmination of the Advent series at Comment, an essay on The Duelling Virgins of London. Merry Christmas to all!

Beyond Marquette's Mary

My long read Advent calendar of Marian pilgrimages continues at Comment Magazine, today's featuring a Guadalupe reflecting the First Nations of North America.

 

Our Lady of India

 The second in my Comment Advent(ture) series: After Zen, Mary.

Everybody's Mother

The first in a four-part Advent series on the Virgin. 

 

The Christian Invention of Art

I lived with a not entirely true idea for nearly two decades until two recent books enabled me to finally give it up.  My latest at Comment on the beloved Barnes Foundation. 

The Palace of Lausos (or Lausus) in Constantinople (a Christian proto-museum)

The Barnes Foundation

Review and Revisiting

A very kind review of Mother of the Lamb by Jason Byassee entitled Grace Without Conquest, and a follow up to my essay on universalism (where DBH, among other interlocutors, chimes in).

The Scandal of the Wiccan Mind

 I tried to connect with my inner goddess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here's what happened.

The Dream of the Nineties...

...is alive in Wheaton. A "letter from the future" chapel talk for the 25th reunion of the Class of '98.

Beyond Aluminum

 This year's liberal arts pep talk:

Native Non-Duality

Well, this piece at Comment ("Return to Bad River") inspired some vigorous reactions. Instead of casting myself as the decolonizing anti-racist hero, I tried to tell the truth, a truth that mandated me looking more than a bit ridiculous, and which cast the Ojibwe as the heroes, which they certainly were on the occasions of our visits, and which — I tried to relate in the piece — they have been in much of the history of Wisconsin as well.

But it turns out that, for some at least, if you even mention Christianity, you are assumed to be a colonizer, and a racist one at that. (Nevermind that the faith has long been embraced by the Ojibwe themselves.) One might even go so far as to call the assumption that Christianity and Indigenous identity are to remain separate (despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise, over and over again) to be "dualistic." But so be it. The church has made enough mistakes that it may be the job of her representatives to suffer such anger today.

It's a good reminder that the space between the church and the powwow grounds (depicted below), is fraught. But this is all the more reason to traverse it when invited (as we were), however ridiculous we may look as we do.

Unravelling the Loom of Doom

 A piece on Mary and Universalism at Eclectic Orthodoxy. 

The Tao of Mary

A talk on Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, the Church of the East, Buddhism, Taoism and beekeeping at the Oxford Interfaith Forum. Die hard Watts fans will love the fact that the same day I gave a talk comparing him to an angry bee, I got a nasty bee sting.

Jung, Evagrius, not lawn mowing

 This conversation with Joe Alto was a delight, as was writing this piece for Comment which is as close as you'll get from me on the "state of evangelicalism."

The Tao of Mary

 I'm giving a talk at the Oxford Interfaith Forum on June 15 on images of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the East. If you'd like to join by Zoom please register here.