"This is Water"

David Foster Wallace on deciding how to see the people around you.

Q195: Mavis Gallant

"He had never really held a place and could not by dying leave a gap."

and 

"[S]he was the daughter of such a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman — pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists."

 — Mavis Gallant

These quotes come from "Voices Lost in Snow" by Mavis Gallant.   You can hear a reading of the story (and a discussion of it) here.

Swartz: "How we stopped SOPA"

Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) — one of the names behind the movement to stop the SOPA legislation last year — remembers that campaign:

A Logic Named Joe

"A Logic Named Joe": a 1950 radio play based on a 1946 short story.    It seems to get the basics of the modern-day Internet right, along with playing around with the idea of a technological singularity.

Download original mp3...

Creatures of Contact

David Rakoff reads his poetic retelling of the Turtle and the Scorpion.

Q178: Past is prologue

"If you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are." 

— Margaret Cutright

(You can hear the whole background that leads up to this quote here.)

"I fought the Law, and..."

Paul Walker delivers an excellent talk on Law and Grace:

"The theological name for scorekeeping is justification by works.  It's the way of life governed by the Law.  It's the way of living life as if life were a contest to be won.  It's the way of living life as if life were a battle out of which one must emerge the victor.  It is a way of life which sees life as an accusation against which one must justify oneself.  [...]  Frankly, it is the way of death:  we always lose when we keep score."

Audio from mbird.com:

Download MP3 from mbird.com...

"The Sacred Script in the Theater of God"

From the archives:  Douglas Wilson addresses the Desiring God 2009 National Conference.   The subject (at an event commemorating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth) is the authority of Scripture.    I thought upon first hearing it (and still think today) that it is probably the most important theological speech given in its decade.   I'd probably still endorse that statement without the "theological" in there.   Have a listen.    

Link to audio (and video, if you swing that way)...

Siloam

Captain of this site's blogroll, Douglas Wilson preached in Tuscaloosa recently, and spoke about seeing the meaning in the recent tornadoes.   Bear with him a while while he sets things up, and he'll then get right to the point.    Well worth a listen.

Page with download / stream links...

Tom Waits in Traffic

A Radiolab segment takes on the idea of making deals with yourself when engaged in creative work.   They stray into the subject of Muses, etc.    Have a listen.   I have to say that I can't count the times I've had some thought or other, and intended to come back to it, only to have it appear somewhere else in the culture soon thereafter.   The idea of ideas circling the globe looking for somewhere to land has some power.

Segment audio...

Adjusting Your Perception

Paul Zahl (Rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, MD) preaches on the Bronze Serpent, and adjusting our understanding of difficult circumstances.   This subject goes pretty deep the more you think about it.

• Link (goes directly to audio player)...
• More sermons by Zahl at the Gospel Coalition site...

"Questioning Evangelism"

Randy Newman (not that Randy Newman) discusses rethinking how to tell other people about the Gospel.

Link to audio...

The Work of the Spirit

Mark Driscoll (Pastor of Mars Hill Church, Seattle) on the work of the Holy Spirit.

Link to audio...

How to talk to Muslims about the Gospel

Thabiti Anyabwile (the Pastor of First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman) presents a very old, but interesting method that many people would never think to use.

Link to audio...

Lyrical Gospel

Oops.

An excellent hour of radio from Radiolab.   Several stories around the theme of unintended consequences.   From the episode description:

You come up with a great idea. You devise a plan. You control for every imaginable variable. And once everything’s in place, the train hops your carefully laid tracks. In this episode, one psychologist's zeal to safeguard national security may have created a terrorist, while one community's efforts to protect an endangered bird had deadly consequences. And against all odds, a toxic lake spawns new life.

Link...

Marilynne Robinson on Home

Marilynne Robinson on her novel Home:

I think that the real emotional content of lives tends to be negotiated in terms of small gestures, little courtesies towards one another, little provisions for one another's comfort, and that whether we're conscious of these things or not we read them continuously as a sort of...we see them as the fabric of our lives with others, and I think that a great deal of generosity and care and love and so on are communicated in what we would call prosaic gestures, and that's just lovely to me. It's a great part of my imagination of the character, really.

Full interview (audio and transcript)...