urbantrappistblogastery

I like Good Friday. I like the violence, the pain. I like the darkness, the vacuum of beauty, the dearth of imagery. I like the directness of the narrative, the absolute focus. Above all, I like the barbaric justice of someone dying for my (mis)deeds. The atoning execution re-establishes equilibrium [...]

In the Hebrew day, all the cool kids quoted Scripture. By cool, I mean smart, but those were more or less equivalent back then: intelligence was the path to priesthood, power. Aspiring rabbis (and everyone wanted to be a rabbi) progressed by passing tests of scriptural knowledge (i.e. knowing the whole thing by [...]

(a really, really long look; brevity is not the soul of this post.)
(also, if you’re reading this on facebook, know that it looks better here. my words need all the beautification they can get.)
Once a day I am a golden god. Glistening with the salty glory of a run and stretched to muscular [...]

When I finally started to run on my own, I thought there was a hierarchy about who could say hi to whom. If you were clearly the superior runner, then it was your privilege whether or not to acknowledge the turtles plodding around you, and woebetide any such slowpoke so uppity as to think [...]

Celebrating Valentine’s Day? You brainless slob.

In these hard times, will we be able to have our art and eat it too?

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and get on with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
—Billy Graham
I’m not talking about unbelief. I don’t even think that statement is true anymore (the [...]

Thanks for understanding the latest grad school-induced hiatus. Now that I’m acclimated to a city with real public transportation, real crime, and a real hyperobsession with politics, I decided to reflect upon what I no longer have.
I shall miss some things about Cincinnati:

The excitement for under-.500 sports teams. Here, people want to [...]

Amidst the many archaic events in the Olympics, one name claims to remain current: the Modern Pentathlon. Originally modeled after necessary skills for an elite 19th century soldier, it involves pistol shooting, equestrian jumping, fencing, mid-distance swimming, and cross country running. Back then, this was all well and good. But times have [...]

This t-shirt found its way onto Engrish recently. While it’s not on the order of hilarity of other translation mishaps, it is by far the most profound and provocative example of Engrish I’ve ever seen. Another instance of Eastern culture confronting and confounding the West, this shirt directly disdains the American Dream of [...]