Susannah Pratt
Sign of the Times
Openings are one part mystery, one part miracle. Who’s to say when they will occur, or what will result.
Awaiting Further Instruction: A Letter to Virginia Woolf
Dear Virginia, I’m writing with some wonderful news. I’ve done it! I have secured a room of my own: a third floor home office in which resides a perfectly adequate writing desk, yellow flowered armchair ideal for reading, and windows overlooking my backyard. As per your wise suggestion, it is even possible to lock the door.
Theology Animated: Serene Jones’ Call It Grace
Call it Grace is not so much a primer on theology as it is a way of animating it. At its base, it’s a memoir and a telling of Jones’ life story overlaid with a theological lens. The book is full of the people that populate her world:
The Camp, Explained
A few summers ago, as my own family survived a brush with cancer, I realized that, while at the camp, it is possible to peaceably coexist with my mortality. In the mountains, a single human life is constantly contextualized, thrown into sharp relief by the ancient boulders and myriad stars.
A Year of No Buying: A Fourth Quarter Report
In the face of a culture that is constantly telling us otherwise, A Year of No Buying allowed us to separate our joy from our things. We were left to find it elsewhere...We had more family outings and more lazy Saturdays, and in the bargain got laughter and creativity and relationship and rest.
A Year of No Buying: A Third Quarter Report
Today is my son Oliver’s high school orientation. As it happens, he will be attending my alma mater, a giant public high school that’s home to some of my favorite memories. This afternoon is therefore inducing in me a curious mixture of nostalgia and anticipation.
A Year of No Buying: A Second Quarter Report: In the Black
In our house, 2018 is A Year of No Buying....I can’t say a bad word about it.
And for the most part, my family feels the same. Or I thought they did. But then my husband went and bought a car. A gorgeous black luxury car that is, as he would like me to point out, a hybrid.
A Year of No Buying: A First Quarter Report
...I want to suggest that the privileged problem of material accumulation is nonetheless still a problem. As Patchett observes in her essay, there is a reason that all major world religions instruct their followers to detach from material things as they seek the divine.
Maps without Us
For my mother, the directions were gospel; for my father, suggestive. He would stare at the highlighted segment of roads, and then improvise to find alternative routes to our destination. Ones that might take us closer to a historical site or through a “scenic byway.” To my father, the maps could be both guide and reference.
Guesswork
I fear that with all this technological help we are unwittingly eroding two critical dimensions of the human experience: error and aspiration. This is worrisome because failure and hope are the very things have propelled human progress to date...Every major breakthrough rests on the back of the hundreds of thousands of errors that came before.
Road Trip
We still scour passing trucks for license plates, aiming to spot all 50 states and some of the provinces before arriving in the mountains. We still read aloud from terrible joke books to pass the time. But I can’t help the feeling that the riddles and Twenty Questions are barely able to compete with Clash of Clans. Boredom is much harder to justify, “just look out the window,” a tougher sell.
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The Waking is the online publication of Ruminate Magazine, a reader-supported magazine helping you slow down, read deeply, and live awake. The Waking is interested in reviews, interviews, and short form prose that, as Bernard Cooper says, "magnif[ies] some small aspect of what it means to be human."
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