Shakespeare's Birthday: Much Ado About A Lot

William Shakespeare was generally agreed to have been born on April 23, 1564 (we aren’t positive, but he was baptized on the 26th), and he died on April 23, 1616.  April 23rd happens to be the Feast Day of St. George, patron saint and protector of England.

Shakes was a celebrity in his day, the entertainer-in-chief of London.  (For fun, take a King James Bible, published in 1611.  Turn to Psalm 46.  Count 46 words from the beginning of the psalm and 46 words from the back.  You get Shakespeare’s name.  Just the sort of word-and-number game that the English Renaissance adored.)

He was a playwright, as all the world knows, and knew.  But his aspiration was to be a poet.   His 154 sonnets are a psalm-cycle to the human spirit, to the human condition, and to human transcendence.

Celebrate. 

Go watch Kenneth Branagh’s outstanding adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.  Or Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet, or Olivier’s King Lear.  Or Ben Kingsley’s Twelfth Night. 

Give it up for the man who pushed English farther than it thought it could go, a poet whose day-job changed what we thought possible in language, and therefore who we are, if we attend to him.

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Love In the Ruins: Teaching Writing In America in 2011

There's a kind of breathtaking insouciance in the student's work.  If you're going to rip off somebody's words, it should be a sentence like, "A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing."  And it should be from a site dedicated to helping you avoid plagiarism.

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Narrating The Success and Failure of God

Where the goal is to be absorbed into God, to be (in the image of Athanasius) drawn up into God as humanity drew him down to itself, there is a drama at work in which each choice becomes a plot device, and it is not only our salvation that hangs in the balance but the very success of God in his bid to undo the work of the devil.

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Untangling Cliché: "Through Christ"

From The Mailbag:
I often hear people refer to how Christians cannot do things in their own strength, but only 'through Christ'. 

Can someone explain this to me? What does this look like applied to our everyday lives? How do we stop trying to do things in 'our own strength' and do them 'through Christs' ?

I think this is one of those questions that troubles a lot more people than care to admit to it. It's like those words that we vaguely think we know the meanings of but really couldn't define if we had to: "glory," "praise," "worship," "through Christ," "in Christ," "in my heart..."

The most modern approach to the question would be to say something like, "By focusing my mental eye on Christ and his life, I will be able to do whatever I need to do." Some would argue that "Things will just come around right" for people of faith, which is sort of a baptism of the power-of-positive-thinking.

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