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Ryan DeHoff's avatar

when i think of inspiration, i think of poetry and music. julien baker, noah, medium build, andrea gibson, buddy wakefield, mary oliver, ee cummings. people who know the pain of the world and still fight to believe in its goodness. the goodness of each other. thanks for this post and for starting the conversation

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Brian Allen's avatar

So much common ground... I found my daughter curled up on our sofa this week reading my dog-eared copy of “Blue Like Jazz” - the one with the yellowed pages and split spine...I wonder what she’ll make of it? She’s just finished her first year at the University of Edinburgh studying theology and we have the best conversations these days...

One of my closest friend’s wives used to work for the UK publishing house that distributed a book by some, then largely unheard of over this side of the pond, author who released a book back in 2005 called “Velvet Elvis”. That book had a massive impact on me and, as a new Dad at the time, I loved the idea of a belief system being like the springs of a trampoline rather than handing down some inherited version of faith made of bricks that could crumble if certain building blocks were removed through persuasive discourse in later life. I wondered how to gift that, how to impart that, how to live that... I don’t particularly follow the cult of Christian celebrity and all the cancel culture wars. I am, however, grateful for Rob Bell’s voice in amidst a broad range of thinkers, creatives, communicators and idea generators.

Bono’s “Surrender” was a bit of a homecoming for me in many ways last year. The urgency of the early U2 records I bought from age 11 onwards has never left me. Bono shaped my thinking in adolescence and ever since. He seemed unashamed of his faith, but it seemed more living and active and real than a lot of other expressions I saw in those formative teenage years (and regularly since then too). Reading and listening to him in his memoir rekindled something of that too - almost like a version of truth I could chime with and want to engage fully with. It can be so easy to want to distance myself from some versions of what people perceive by the word “Christian”. (Brian McClaren’s “Should I Stay Christian?” was a helpful read about a lot of that last year as was “Woven” by Joel McKerrow in recent years). “Surrender” is a theme I hadn’t really noticed woven so fully through U2’s catalogue and it is a word I came to really ponder in many areas of my own life.

Nick Cave’s “Faith, Hope, Carnage” was a stand-out read too. Such brutal honesty, vulnerability and fresh ideas and expression.

B. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

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