A review of literature, the arts, and public affairs
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- Founded:
- 1937
The Cresset Christian Scharen on Billie Holiday and one of America's most haunting songs.
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Some people think that the blues is something that is evil—I don’t. If the blues is delivered in the truth, which most of them are, if I sing the blues and tell the truth, what have I done? What have I committed? I haven’t lied.
The Cresset Feel bad about not getting to all those books on your reading list? Not ready for your book club meeting? Pierre Bayard tells us not to feel bad about taking some shortcuts.
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“Who is Mark Noll?” was an awkward question coming from an academic administrator, accented by his dazed look when I mentioned Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I left that Christian campus with mixed feelings, ...
The Cresset Rev. Tom's Excellent Interfaith Adventure!
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This year it was the Presbyterians’ turn to host the annual interfaith Thanksgiving Eve worship service. Actually, it was our turn last year, but the Roman Catholic bishop had announced plans to close ...
The Cresset
Joel Kurz says “Luth where you live.” He’s encouraged by the renewed sense of
vocation he finds among Lutherans.
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In the fall of 2006, I was a rare Lutheran at a Catholic Worker national gathering in Iowa—the only others were all former. Waiting around for dinner in the large hall that first night, I struck up a conversation ...
The Cresset What does Battlestar Galactica have to tell us about the meaning of life?
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The third time did it for me. That is, when the third person I met at an academic conference told me that Battlestar Galactica was the best show on television, I decided to give it a try. By the end of the first episode, I was hooked. ...
The Cresset Lisa Deam finds both fact and fabrication in the stories that shape our lives.
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One evening not long after my daughter was born, I got out of the house and attended a crop—a gathering of people who work on their scrapbooks. During show and tell time, one of the veteran scrapbookers, whose name was Helen, held up a page from her album. ...
The Cresset Valpo Provost Mark Schwehn considers the role that Lutheranism can play in shaping the future of higher education.
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The role that Lutheranism might play in helping both to shape and to secure the future of university education in this country will be very modest. We can be sure of this for at least three reasons. First, ...
The Cresset The Cresset's Advent-Christmas 2009 issue will be out soon. Watch for essays by Mark Schwehn, Lisa Deam, Christina Bieber Lake, and Christian Scharen.
The Cresset Conrad Ostwalt reviews John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt, a serious look at the nature of religious faith in an age of uncertainty.
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What do you do when you’re not sure....” So begins Father Flynn’s sermon near the beginning of Doubt. Father Flynn delivers his sermon to a largely blue collar Catholic congregation in the Bronx in the year following President Kennedy’s assassination. ...
The Cresset Erin Dalpini reviews Toni Morrison's latest novel A Mercy.
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Imagine for a moment that it is 1682: the United States of America has yet to be organized, the laws of the land are fluid, and the slave trade is in its early stages. Somewhere at the edge of the forest in New York, there is an empty mansion with a faint glow coming from one of the rooms. ...
The Cresset "'Three generations of imbeciles is enough,' Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1927." Gary Fincke's latest essay "Brains" looks at how our society understands mental disability.
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My mother said fish was brain food. She breaded it and fried it and told me to finish whatever she put on my plate, and for a while I expected my IQ to rise, maintaining the same belief in that promise as I had in the carrots she fed me to cure my nearsightedness.
The Cresset Poetry in The Cresset. We recently added a poetry page to The Cresset website. All of the poems from every issue will be available online.
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The Cresset Do we really owe the last thirty years of rock and roll to Kiss?
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We owe the last thirty years of rock ‘n’ roll to Kiss. I write this as someone who does not have a single Kiss record in his collection. I always considered them evildoers, those who “whet their tongues like swords,” shooting their love guns “suddenly and without fear” at the blameless. ...
The Cresset David Lott is a graduate of St. Olaf College and Luther Seminary who works as a religious book editor in Washington, DC. His new Cresset column on "Citizenship" will explore the quality of public discourse and civic life in the United States today. In the first edition, he looks at what is driving the passion behind the current health care debate.
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Whether or not they have been actively engaged in the current debate over health-care reform, almost everyone has a story about an encounter with the health-care system that in some way encapsulates their opinion. ...
