surrender
INDIE-ROCKER MAGGIE Rogers says she feels her emotions in her teeth: Anger and love make her gums pulse and jaw tighten. Rogers’ second studio album, Surrender, is testament to what happens when we unclench our jaws and give our emotions room to breathe.
“This is the story of what happened when I finally gave in,” Rogers said in the trailer for Surrender. The result is a cohesive journey through the many questions that plague our grief-stricken culture. Offering both solace and space for unanswered questions, the album, released last summer, is an invitation to dance — to surrender to the coexistence of beauty and suffering in the world.
A fringe Christian ideology helped stoke an out-of-control gun culture. People of faith are working to take back the conversation.
The back-lit morning wave
Clarified emerald suddenly in olive,
Then gone; forever the cry of the Christ's torso
In Rubens' "Elevation of the Cross";
A glass pepper shaker filled to overflowing
By a finger of fallen sun at the close
Of a most mundane afternoon.
Obsessed is perhaps too strong a wod
It was my junior year of college. I sat in the balcony of chapel listening to a message and expecting nothing more than the usual chapel routine.
My life up until that point had been all about finding control and self-worth, which centered on academics and hard work. Blame my culture or my textbook Type A work patterns, but really the core of the issue was my pride and self-reliance. I wanted (and probably in some ways still want) to control and perfect every aspect of my life. X plus Y equals Z, right?
So, I sat there completely unaware that it would be a message that I still haven’t forgotten.
Dear HFASS,
How are you? I am fine.
Actually that’s not true.
See, I wrote another sermon this week. A real one. I worked on it all week. And then yesterday afternoon I threw it away and just wrote you this letter instead. Because I realized that in my sermon I was trying really hard to convince you of something.
Finally, as President Obama has announced, this American war will soon be over, with most of the 44,000 American troops still in Iraq coming home in time to be with their families for Christmas.
The initial feelings that rushed over me after hearing the White House announcement were of deep relief. But then they turned to deep sadness over the terrible cost of a war that was, from the beginning, wrong; intellectually, politically, strategically and, above all, morally wrong.
The War in Iraq was fundamentally a war of choice, and it was the wrong choice.
In 2010, the moral measure of tax policy choice is: Does it further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few?