Monday :: May 5, 2008

Mystery and Mayhem:
Reading Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita While Dating an Atheist in Seattle

by Becky Crook

The first time I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I was too swept away with its hot-blooded madness to grasp what the deuce Bulgakov intended with his novel.

When I returned for a second reading, my pietistic judgments of the violence and debauchery obscured the experience. But the book was a gift from a close friend whose mind I admired, and my third attempt resurrected the novel for me when I, in the heat of the late summer of 2007, finished reading it in the context of what has frequently been labeled both as America’s most literate and most un-churched city.

Actually, it was a . . .

Tuesday :: April 29, 2008

Nothing Is As It Seems

by Courtney Druz

It matters that this is true:
that pushing the stroller up the hill,
filled with sleeping boy and girl,
I thought about my muscles and
didn’t see the sky like smoke
at four o’clock, the drying trees
like black veins in the gray.

It matters that I thought
about my boots, that they were good,
and didn’t hear the red-eyed cars
rushing like wind, their terrible trumpets,
then the whisper of leaves.

All I saw, all at once,
black letters
stenciled on the pavement like a cut into stone,
the black showing through . . .

Monday :: April 28, 2008

Children and Violence in Developing Nations Impacted by Armed Internal Conflict (DNIAIC)

by Michael Lee McGill

INTRODUCTION

I’m a thirty-three year old, one-year-married, Christian Seattleite and it seems like friends and family all around me are producing babies like rabbits. Last month my housemate even had a baby in room! I’m not joking. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be living in the global south! There are nearly 2.2 billion people under eighteen years old alive today.¹ That is one third of the world’s population. The more shocking reality is that over 88 percent of these children are in developing nations.² That is . . .

Friday :: April 25, 2008

Spring Prayer

by Courtney Druz

It is easy to praise doubt
for most beauty wavers subtly,
sways, blossoms, dissolves in petals.

And it is easy to praise frailty
for most of us are frail
as a shimmering gorgeous beetle
ripe for the crushing.

But let me grow beyond the brittle carapace;
let me grow bones within
to leap like an ibex on the crags
with that sure footing which approaches flight.

Wednesday :: April 23, 2008

Our Gift is Our Song: A Review of Mark McKim’s Christian Theology for a Secular Society: Singing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land

by Daniel Tidwell

Mark McKim approaches systematic theology with the same ecclesial and scholastic concerns that have driven nearly two decades of pastoral ministry.

His work is both careful and precise as it attempts to navigate a systematic approach to theology as contextualized in a secular post-Christendom West. While it takes more than a little while to really delve into the heart of his work—the first eighty-three pages are reserved for three thorough prologues—McKim builds his theol . . .