Daniel Taylor's Blog

 
It has been a sobering few days. First the word from a former student and long-time friend that her twin sister, who has traveled abroad with us, had a sudden onset of mental illness last winter and had committed suicide a few days prior.
Then a visit a couple of days ago to another former student who was bitten by a mosquito last year and developed West Nile disease, leaving her totally paralyzed except for eye movement. And totally conscious and aware. My colleague and I read her the Poohsticks bridge ...

Today, July 21, is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway. A man once rightfully thought a great writer but now well out of favor because of the ideological observation that he did not treat women correctly, either in his fiction or his life.
Joan Didion, in a recent reprint of a masterful 1998 essay (thanks to great friend John Wilson for passing it on), points out that he changed the way fiction was written—for the better—and offers a lucid account of how he did so in a brilliant analysis of the opening ...

I am a fan of epigraphs—short fragments of others’ words and thoughts that precede and set a direction for one’s own. I use them in my own writing whenever I can. As with a draft of a novel I sent off yesterday, one that has taken a circuitous and as yet uncompleted pilgrimage toward possible publication. I blessed it with four or five epigraphs to wish the story well and on its way.
But this morning, I discovered a sentence (rediscovered actually, for I had read and marked it months ago) ...

To save you time, I am offering the best part first–a fine poem by a favorite poet: Denise Levertov. It’s from her collection The Stream and the Sapphire. And it captures well a part of the human experience, including my own–and perhaps yours (which is all we can ask a poem to do). This will be followed by some random reflections of doubtful interest regarding my own life as a writer/blogger.
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its ...

I just read something in Seth Haines’ Coming Clean that I wish I had read last week. I was interviewed a few days ago for a documentary on the church—including why even believers are leaving it. I said what I had to say and will have to trust that it might be useful to someone, if it even makes the final cut.
But just now I read the following sentence from Haines’ book about his overcoming addiction—in his case alcohol, though he claims most all of us have one. He is ...

This post is all “I wonder . . .” with no firm assertions or even “I believe . . . .”
A church historian speaking to our adult Sunday school class yesterday used the phrase “apprehension of pre-existent faith” and attributed it to Henry Cardinal Newman, the great 19th-c believer/thinker. I found the phrase pregnant and have spent a hunk of time this morning trying to see how Newman uses that phrase. Turns out “apprehension” is an important word for Newman, but also quite technical. I didn’t set aside the morning ...

For the eight of you waiting breathlessly for my fourth novel (the third one is mostly done but on hold, awaiting further plot developments), let me bless you with a new term that I just came up with five minutes ago: ethical materialism (which won out narrowly, and perhaps temporarily, over ethical naturalism).
My narrator for all four novels is Jon Mote. He has problems—lots of them. Some are more or less cognitive, in the sense of trying to understand the human condition, the world around him, and his place in ...

Lisa, a friend at a distance (which is not the same as a distant friend), recently sent me this quotation from Richard Rohr: “Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt and ‘unknowing,’ and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.”
I’m not well acquainted with the quite famous Friar Rohr. The Internet declares he is either a source of great wisdom for the Christian or another New Agey “spirituality” guru from “Many Paths Up the Mountain Land.” I’ll simply say that I find this particular assertion true and ...

At the heart of metaphor is the ability to see relationships between seemingly unrelated things. For instance, there are some ways in which “my Luve” is like “a red, red rose.” (Bobby Burns–simile being a subset of metaphor.) I want to propose a relationship between our attitudes about immigrants/immigration and about the unborn/abortion, one that presents a moral challenge to all socio-political ideologies.
The concept of “the Other” (thank you Hegel, Husserl, de Beauvoir, et al) has suffered the fate of many other once useful concepts and become a generic slogan ...

One of the great benefits of reading is the combination of pleasure and profit that arises from the marriage of wisdom and words—which is to say, wisdom that owes its revelation and effect to the words chosen to embody it. Anyone who helps us come to terms with the human experience is our friend. Someone who does so in powerful and graceful language is a potential soul friend. (See Celtic Christianity’s “anachmara”)
I came across such a marriage recently in a single sentence in an article by Kevin Williamson : “There is ...