Turmoil + soul = jazz

So I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep. Some years back. And I’m thinking about money. Not thinking so much as fretting. Probably panicking. So I go downstairs and for some reason stand in front of my bookshelf, looking up at the books I hadn’t looked at or considered or opened for a long time. …

Looking at Buellton Sideways

A throwback article about one of my favourite trips ... tracing the drunken footsteps of Paul Giamatti

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …

Mud pies in the slums: The Wait of Glory

C.S. Lewis was wrong, I reckon. In The Weight of Glory he famously says that we satisfy ourselves making mud pies in the slums because we don't know how good it is to build sandcastles at the beach. WRONG. I've built sandcastles at the beach. I know what it's like to sit in the sun …

What’s love got to do with it: Theology and its defences against the dark arts

Towards the end of my very brief career as a theologian in a conservative, fundamentalist, NZ theological college, I had come to the sad realisation that theology, as an academic discipline, is unable — incapable rather than unwilling — to say things about love that art, even in its most popular forms, is more naturally …

A Queen story: You buggers can sing harder than I can

Bohemian Rhapsody was the first song I remember being aware of as a kid. I have a clear memory of us kids singing it in the schoolyard and making up lyrics because, clearly, no one knew what the actual words were. Those memories are filed alongside other powerful ones from the time: the smell of …

Rock bottom: JK Rowling’s solid foundations

There are several quotes by writers that I come back to when the going gets tough. JK Rowling's speech at Harvard in 2008 has been a go-to many times over the past 10 years. What resonates? Her acknowledgement of the length of the tunnel; her stripping away of inessentials, what some would call 'failure'; her …

On writing: Wild Wood and the Babadook

It was just one small comment, but it made a world of difference. 'I love that process of being told by the work what it is, but it also requires faith and trust and that can be hard.' Just a flash of understanding that acts like a key, a key that unlocks ... me. I …

The crooked man

I'd rather be playing an invisible fiddle in the dark and hope that someone could hear it than give in to a life of rationality and logic — Tommy Tiernan