Ripatrazone on Writers Who Run

I've linked to Nick Ripatrazone's work before. He's a jack-of-all-trades: a high school teacher, father to young children, fiction writer, and compiler of an interview series with Catholic authors, among other things. In other words, he's my much-more-accomplished doppelganger: he inhabits many of the worlds that I dabble in, and has quickly become one of the preeminent voices at the intersection of faith and fiction.

If our interests and roles couldn't overlap more, I've just discovered that Nick, like me, is a runner. I ran distance in high school and college before settling into an off-again, on-again training schedule. Check out his most recent essay in The Atlantic, "Why Writers Run." Nick's own webpage is here.

My own blogging has been sparse of late, as some additional duties at school have kept me busier than normal. I hope to have a real post up soon!

Article at Aleteia

Aleteia, a Catholic news and spirituality site, is running my piece "Another Reason to Curl Up with a Good Book," which is a shortened version of my post on narratives earlier this month. Thanks to them!

For a more literary spin on the idea of narratives and Christian love, see my thoughts on poet Christian Wiman's spiritual memoir here.

Crawford, Consumerism, and Catholicism: On The World Beyond Your Head



After much anticipation I finally got through Matthew Crawford’s most recent book, The World Beyond Your Head. Earlier this year I posted about an extract I had read from the book in the form of an article in The New Atlantis.

The Need for Narrative

A few days ago I was deep in the usual end-of-quarter mire of essays and tests. The first such occasion for feverish grading during the school year brings the sourest batch of stress and despair. At least at the end of the second quarter there is a milestone—halfway!—and mid-year exams signal a leaving-behind, a moving-on to new material. At the end of the third quarter, well, the snow is melting and we see the homestretch, so there is hope beyond the mountain of dried wood pulp. And of course the end of the year brings with it liberation, and grading is almost a joy. But the teacher who assigned too much at the end of the first quarter (and who doesn’t?) knows a darkness that he would not wish on his worst enemy. There’s no sweetness that accompanies the heave-ho of grading then, for with three quarters to go, where is the relief?