More of This, Less of That

Barbara Lane
Truth
Early on a Thursday morning two weeks ago, I gathered my bags and hit the road for Laity Lodge's annual artist retreat, including Art House America founders and friends. Eight hours and a triple-shot latte later, I turned off Highway 83 and eased the car down a gravel road. Hand-carved signs punctuated the progression of slopes and curves leading down into the canyon, asking me to slow down. At the bottom of the canyon, the road disappeared into a river. I stopped to double-check the driving directions. “Turn left into the river . . . ”

Her Voice, Her Guitar

Jenni Simmons
Music
In a sense, Danielle is the catalyst of Raising Up the Dead. She wrote six songs — literally half of the album. Her songs are extremely well-written, and they resonate as deeply personal. “Some of them are hard to even talk about,” said Danielle. “I don’t mind sharing them in the guise of poetry and lyrics, but it’s hard to come right out and talk about them.”

The Joy of Making

Lindsay Crandall
Crafty
When I was a child and my mother called me over so she could pull the measuring tape around my chest and along my torso, I didn’t think much of it. She knitted often, and making sweaters for me was a regular event. We lived in upstate New York; sweaters were necessary. Being a child, though, those sweaters didn’t mean much more than my other pieces of clothing. To me, they were just sweaters.

Church History and Our ABCs

Katy Bowser
Artful Kids, Bookish, Truth
I’m six months pregnant with my first child and nesting like there’s no tomorrow. Nesting takes many forms for me: cleaning, painting, sorting, shredding, and acquiring. A substantial portion of the process involves acquiring books — books about pregnancy, nutrition, labor and birth, baby development, philosophies of child-raising, and how to love a child as part of our family, our church, our neighborhood, and the world.

Going Green Collegiate Style

Nancy Sleeth
Creation Care
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at a college convocation. When I told the Director of Spiritual Life that I would share my creation-care journey and then ask students to work in small groups on a Good Steward Covenant — committing to specific actions they would take in a day, a week, a month, and a year — I could see he was a bit skeptical. No speaker had ever done anything quite like this in a convocation, but he was game.
Raising Artful Children: a Grandmother’s Perspective

Raising Artful Children: a Grandmother’s Perspective

Andi Ashworth
Artful Kids

In this grand vocation of teaching kids about the world, it’s important to give careful thought to the environments we create for them to grow up in — grandparents’ homes included. Our homes are not neutral places, but rather culture-shaping places. We’re helping to form ideas, attitudes, imagination, compassion, and skills. Our little people will one day be big people who take their places in the flow of history. In hundreds of vocational spheres — as mothers and fathers, artists and scientists, shopkeepers and CEOs — our children and grandchildren will grow up to be the culture-makers of their generation.

Tea and Liturgy

Sandra McCracken
Feast
I grew up as the youngest of five boisterous kids, and liturgy was not a major part of our family culture. Church was formal, but relegated to Sunday mornings. Impulse was our modem operandi; ritual was the exception. These days, I maintain that improvisational lifestyle. I don’t have a daily commute. In fact, I don’t drive the same route twice if I can help it. (This used to make my husband crazy when he was first learning his way around Nashville.) A singer-songwriter by trade, I don’t even play the same set list two nights in a row. But in my mid-twenties, I took up the habit of afternoon tea.

Full Circle: Back to Dallas

Jenny White
Truth
Almost two years ago exactly, I entered the Art House for the first time. Like someone who had been there a hundred times before, I came in through the kitchen door and sat down at the Great White Table (the best place in the house). I had recently made the career transition from politics to entertainment through my job with the Wedgwood Circle and our team was in Nashville to help co-host a musician retreat at the Art House.

On Learning to See

Jenni Simmons
Bookish
There is a gastronomical upset brought upon by reading God-awful writing, but that is not the kind of which I speak. If these books that lure me do yield any bitterness, it is because they turn my world upside down with an unveiling of reality. They change me and form me — and sometimes, reversing my mindset is a bit unpleasant. Not meant as a quick gulp of novelty or escape, these are books to read, eat, and chew . . . slowly, like meditation.

Worship, Art, and Justice

Justin McRoberts
Justice
I’m hardly the first person to point out that the semantic confusion between “worship” and “music” has been damaging to both “worship” and “music.” This is not to say that the relationship between the two must be severed. On the contrary, I believe worship and the arts are linked in essential ways. But I also believe a third idea must be introduced in order for us to come to a fuller understanding of that relationship. That idea is “Justice.”

It’s Easy Being Green

Charlie Peacock and Emma Sleeth
Creation Care
Emma Sleeth has left dorm life to move back in with her parents. Though she’s living in the basement, Emma is concerned that her ecological footprint is bigger now than it was at college: “It’s not like I’ve suddenly started throwing Styrofoam in streams or anything. I still recycle, dry my clothes on a rack, and use compact fluorescent lights. We even compost at home, which my cafeteria at college did not do.”
Nurturing the Ties that Bind

Nurturing the Ties that Bind

Andi Ashworth
Feast

A few years ago, I had a hankering to gather my grown children and grandchildren to our home for a meal. The busyness of all our lives, along with the frequent company of houseguests, makes time with just our family a rarity. In this particular season, I had my head most often in books and academic deadlines while I worked on a master's degree, so moving everything else aside for few days in order to pour myself into the elaborate creation of a meal was a true pleasure. Creativity in the kitchen was good medicine.

A Walking Contradiction, Part Two

A Walking Contradiction, Part Two

Charlie Peacock
Truth

I have a friend who wryly describes herself as a bad Buddhist. This makes me smile. I think of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Little Big Man and the many vocations he pursued over a lifetime: Caucasian Cherokee, drunk, gunslinger, muleskinner, liar, and more. With each one he describes his performance as horribly lacking. Can you hear the actor’s voice? I was a horrible drunk. I was a horrible liar. Well, I was a horrible Zen Buddhist.

It All Began with Two Simple Questions

Nancy Sleeth
Creation Care
We stayed like that, just sitting in the tropical moonlight, for a long time. I couldn’t help but compare the peacefulness of the night air with the busyness of our lives back home. So rarely did we have time to stop and think, to discuss the big questions of life. Our conversation rambled from art and music, to books we were reading, to the state of the world.

And then I asked two questions that would change our lives forever.
The Epistemology of Love

The Epistemology of Love

Steven Garber
Truth

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.

Three Sanctuaries

Jenni Simmons
Visual Art
Whenever I walk towards the austere building, I’m struck anew by the genius of its placement in a cozy neighborhood where people live, the true life of a city. The idea of sanctuary comes alive between the quiet streets. I’m soothed under the shade of old, twisting oak trees. I take refuge from the sweltering Texas sun by snagging a bench under the high, undulating awnings outside, or by opening a tall glass door to the Menil itself, flowing with cool air and natural light filtered by means of louvers, skylights, and massive windows.
A Walking Contradiction, Part One

A Walking Contradiction, Part One

Charlie Peacock
Bookish, Truth

My parents raised me for fourteen years. No more, no less. That may seem like an odd thing to say but it’s true. Some kids don’t get that much time. All you have to do is go to the grocery store or a fast food place to find out what I mean. Shifty eyes, mumbled grunts, manners in retreat, unclean hands, inability to count change. I’m grateful for the fourteen good years of proper parenting I had. Then Jack Kerouac took over. He was a lousy parent. As suburban shamans go, you couldn’t do better. Jack Kerouac, writer and former football star, was a game-changer.

Laura Alice

Lanier Ivester
Hospitality

It was a gala affair, not only because we’d been gone for so many weeks and reunions were in order, but because it was the October birthday celebration of both of the wives of our triumvirate of couples. With my husband’s gracious permission and assistance, I went all out: a champagne toast; artichokes with lemon-thyme butter for a first course; the loveliest cut of tenderloin; the ripest, richest Bordeaux; the most jubilantly-English flavors of Stilton and Cheshire for the cheese course; and a silver compote of succulent dried apricots and dates to follow it ‘round the table. 

And the pièce de résistance: an absolutely decadent steamed ginger pudding that had been simmering maddeningly away on the back burner all afternoon in a little antique mold. If I’ve ever been proud of anything in my life, it was that pudding.

There’s Nothing Little About It

Kristin Russell
Bookish

“I read a book that I think you would really like,” a friend said while I cut his hair.

“Oh yeah? What's it called?” I asked.

“[mumble, mumble, something] Little League,” he said, or at least that's what I heard him say.

“What?” I asked, wondering why he thought I would ever enjoy a book about baseball (I’m not exactly Sporty Spice).

“Little Bee,” he clarified.

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