The Rabbit Room

Here at the height of his poetic power, Malcolm Guite delivers a tale of adventure in ballad form that plumbs the depths of the human soul, carries readers through the Wasteland, and sets them upon the numinous shores of Faerie in all its mystery and meaning. In this first volume of Merlin’s Isle, join the prophesied youth, Sir Galahad, and the other knights of the quest as they set out from Camelot to achieve the Holy Grail.

by Kate Gaston Note: On Thursday, March 20, Kate is hosting a lunch discussion titled Questions as Creativity: Faith, Loneliness, and the Hospitality of Conversation via Zoom, exclusively for Rabbit Room members. Support our work and join this event. You can also connect with Kate and the Rabbit Room at the upcoming Inkwell Evening in Nashville at Belmont University for a night of arts and ideas on Friday, March 21. It’s Sunday morning.

by Gracy Olmstead I read once of a culture in which children learned to walk long distances from a very early age. The story went that a three-year-old would be expected to accompany a parent three miles (being carried for much of the distance), and that a four-year-old should be willing to go four (again, not entirely on foot). The five-year-old would go five miles, the six-year-old six, and so on. The older the child, the greater their ability to trek long distances with adult help and support.

by Caroline Cobb Scene 1: I am standing in his hospital room, overwhelmed with the feeling that death is just so…. wrong. My dad passed away just moments ago, but the “most natural thing in the world” seems terribly unnatural. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. In the weeks that follow, I will feel more awake than ever to the “curse of sin and death” we read about so often in the Bible. To the mortality of everyone I love. To the fleeting nature of things.

By Matthew Dickerson A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.

By Heidi Johnston This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3 from Rabbit Room Press. You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com. Those Who Feel Distant from God .pdf Download PDF • 37KB Jehovah Shalom, God of our peace, You promised that your burden would be light. Yet here I am, shoulders bent under the weight of a silence that is long and heavy. I call to you, and wait, and hear no answer. I cry to you, but do not hear your voice.

We love seeing ourselves on TV. Particularly when glimpses of our Christian lives appear on the big screen in ways that connect our spirituality to everyday existence. It helps us bridge the sacred to the secular. The fifth and latest season of the TV show, Fargo, is a ten-episode series that bridges this chasm in an altogether unexpected way. The show is not made with an explicitly Christian framework in mind but I believe it is among the best representations of “sacred” television we have today.

To those who have read the book of Acts, it will come as no surprise that the apostle Paul was a master evangelist and contextualizer, but it is less immediately obvious that he was also a student of poetry and art. A cursory reading of the narratives of his missionary journeys in the book of Acts shows that Paul used every means at his rhetorical disposal to communicate the gospel.

[Editor's Note: This post resumes Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music which ran in 2020-2021. In this series, we share five shorter classical pieces followed by one more substantial piece—all inside a given theme. With over 600 years of music to draw from, the hope is that you find a few old favorites combined with one or two new discoveries in each post.] Architecture and music don’t always feel like natural bedfellows. In fact, you might think they were mutually exclusive.

I am a recovering cynic. I have been fiercely analytical, suspicious, and strong on speculative judgments. I could stare down a false motive at one thousand yards and fire off a critical word as soon as the target was in range. I am also a recovering romantic; in those rare moments when I found trust, I would go all in, and my imagination knew no limits in its restless search for perfection.