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Articles by Donovan McAbee
The Unexpected Joys of a Geriatric Debut
If I were 26 years old, full of piss and vinegar and had a debut poetry collection, I’d fancy myself a modern-day troubadour. I’d live out of my car, which would likely be a beat-up Volvo station wagon, with a COEXIST bumper sticker slapped across the back windshield. I’d inflict my poems on both suspecting and unsuspecting audiences, roaming from town to town, taking the stage at whatever coffee shops would have me.
What John Prine’s Music Reminds Us After the Cancellation of Our NEH Grant
On April 11th, we were made aware that our National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “‘Boundless Love’: Changing Understandings of the Sacred in Americana Music,” had been terminated—only one year into its two-year plan. Our grant of nearly $150,000 was aimed at developing the skills of undergraduate college students to conduct interdisciplinary humanities research about religion and culture, then translate that research for a public audience.
My Christian Faith Won't Let Me Vote for Donald Trump
When I step into the voting booth next week, I will participate in making my voice heard on local, state, and federal issues that range from a local transit tax, all the way to who will represent me in the U.S. House, Senate, and ultimately who will be our next President. Like millions of Americans of faith, my religious beliefs will be the central factor in my decision-making process.
The Shared Solace in Southern Folk Songs
I have no clue what the upstairs neighbors must have thought. I wouldn’t call what I was doing at the time singing—more like a semimelodious howling while strumming a guitar. Back then I correlated sincerity with volume, and at twenty-three, I was nothing if not sincere. That spring, I had taken a semester off from seminary and was spending my days on Long Island with my terminally ill mother, reading William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and George Herbert. I was trying my hand at writing too.
How We’ve Failed Young People Amid the Gun Violence Crisis
Ideas November 21, 2023 7:00 AM EST McAbee is poet, essayist, and theologian, whose work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, The Hudson Review, The Sun (US), and a variety of other publications. He has spoken widely in university and congregational settings throughout the US and the UK. He works as Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. On Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023 Jillian Ludwig’s family returned home to New Jersey from Nashville.
The Tunnel | By Donovan McAbee | Issue 574 | The Sun Magazine
It started with the mouse in the grass by the sidewalk, ants crawling on its face. Aidan wanted to touch it. I drew him back and held him. We talked about the gray fur and the tiny ants. He asked if the mouse was going to go home to his mama and daddy. No, I told him, the mouse won’t get to go home again. Maybe he goes to play with his friends. No, I said again, the mouse won’t get to play with his friends.
Lawn Skeletons | By Tom McAllister | Issue 574 | The Sun Magazine
In my New Jersey neighborhood it’s become kind of a thing for people to decorate their front lawns with skeletons year-round. On New Year’s they put little party hats on them, give them a champagne flute to hold. On Mardi Gras, beads draped around their necks, maybe a cigarette clamped in their jaws. Fourth of July, all kinds of red-white-and-blue regalia. During the long stretches between holidays, the skeletons rest. Most often in Adirondack chairs. Maybe it’s like this all over the country.
The Southern Baptist Convention's Long War for the Patriarchy Original
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the Upstate of South Carolina. The pulpit of that congregation was commanded by male pastors throughout my childhood. There was the senior pastor, who was arrested for illegally restricting access to a women’s health clinic. There was another senior pastor, a married man of course, who was sleeping with a woman from his previous church and making advances on at least one woman at our church.
How Do We Respond to this Hell. In Nashville After the Shooting
On Friday, March 31, 2023, I sat in a small room, just off the choir loft at Woodmont Christian Church, the church where I’m a member, in Nashville, Tenn. From that room, I listened as the legendary singer, Vince Gill, sang for the funeral of Evelyn Dieckhaus, one of the nine-year-old children killed in The Covenant School shooting just a few days prior. I don’t know how Gill kept his composure—how his vocals stayed so true.
Stayin’ Alive: How Disco Saved Daddy
Ties He hated the Bee Gees, couldn’t stand platform shoes, and deplored the only pair of polyester pants he’d ever owned. July 10, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET After he and Mom divorced, Dad went out some weekends with a group from church. The group, made up entirely of divorced people, was called “Singles Again,” an unfortunate name for a collection of people whose failed marriages had already caused them enough trauma.
Delirium
[Skip to Content Landing] Full Text For days, the silver sprinkler high on the wall is a mouse poking its head out. The tangle of tubing draped over the circulation-boot pump is a Medusa-woman’s hair. You watch a battle rage on the blank TV screen; outside the hospital room window, the white-washed high-rise makes you think you’re in Miami, though you’ve never been. Then again, you’ve never died before either, never come back like Lazarus to this same old unfamiliar world.
Rupture
They let me cut the umbilical cord that late night when you convulsed into the bright lights. They lifted you by the heel. You gasped that first breath, latched onto your mother’s breast. Witness to wonder, wonderstruck, I held you then against my chest, whispered again and again— oh my son, child of love, child of love. Section Editor: Rafael Campo, MD, MA, Associate Editor. Corresponding Author: Donovan McAbee, MDiv, PhD (donovan.mcabee@belmont.edu). Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
Holy The Body - The Sun Magazine
I’ve thought so little of you that now you seek your revenge in the grinding of kneecaps, the tightening of hamstrings, loss of elasticity, the skin. So long neglected, you weren’t even an afterthought. I apologize each morning with a handful of pills. Oh, scarred flesh of me in the mirror, as I turn the page on another decade, I bless the stretch marks on my stomach, evidence of those dead years when food was my one friend.
Sightings - The Sun Magazine
Shortly after her death, Mother Teresa appeared in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee. She looked serious, perturbed even, as though this epiphany were an inconvenience. Once, in the nineties, when statues of the Virgin were crying all over Ireland, one in Donegal did not get the memo. A sign hung around its neck announcing: This Holy Mother Out of Order. I found myself, two years after Mom died, in the second pew from the front in a dark, empty chapel.
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