Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City (2013)

Music

A soundtrack for our time Vampire Weekend is four musicians who met as students at Columbia University. Modern Vampires of the City, their third…

Neko Case, The Worse Things Get…(2013)

Music

Music for When You’re Lost I’ve heard Neko Case only once in concert—she opened for Emmylou Harris—and ever since I’ve wished I could hear…

The Casual Vacancy (J.K. Rowling, 2013)

Books

Behind drawn curtains in the shadow of ruins There is a “casual vacancy” in Pagford. That's what they call it when a member of…

Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012)

Movies

A Theology of the Imagination Who is God?  Ask a secular friend and his/her answers may surprise you. Yes, it is possible to be…

Train
Cigarette

Poetry

Train In the dim, flat, yellowish light of the cabin, my brothers and the other passengers sat almost motionless, staring out through green-tinted windows,…

Karen Choi, Paper Birch (2012)

Culture / Music

Touching time, sensing something more Karen Choi has been on the move—Nebraska to Missouri to Minnesota to Missouri with a brief stopover in Tennessee…

Margie’s 2013 Christmas Gift List

Art / Books / Safe Place

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro, Grove Press, NY, 2013. (Short story collection) Quatro writes short stories like a post-modern Flannery…