Critic Cal

IF YOU’RE KILLED ON ZOOM YOU DIE HERE This is your body Breaking up At 50 megabits-per-second Straight to my front room A three-by-four of eyes and mouths Unanswerable sound I love you for an hour every day The pixels of our faces numbered We are better than a multiplex of data Gathered Each one to our own home On the night you were betrayed We took the slice and blessed it Everything is what you make of it A host of fragments un-assembled At our private suppers I have eagerly desired to be left alone Forgive me For I do not know what we are doing Carolyn Whitnall, 2020 The other day I requested a Zoom link that I never received. It was for a church thing. The common sense response would've been to ask again, over a different channel. But I was tired and lonely and sad and so I just skipped the session and chalked it up as the latest episode in the lengthy, rambling narrative of rejection that, when I'm tired and lonely and sad, feels like the en...

"Jesus died to save us". I have known this for many years, and "knew" exactly what it meant, perhaps even before I could've written the words down. But it turns out (you don't say?!) that not every believer in all times and places has "known" the same meaning. I've been reading and thinking about this a lot lately. About how familiar images and formulations that present as objective and universal are in fact rooted in particular historical circumstances and power arrangements. About how oppressed and enslaved people have encountered and received Jesus in profoundly different ways to those prescribed by the religion of the ruling classes. About how the various ideas that resonate with me knock up against each other seemingly irreconcilably. There is no "context-free" theology, and perhaps it is reductive to reach for such a thing. After all, God (I believe) was not content to remain an abstract idea, but consented (and consents) to...

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?” ( Jonah 3:10-4:4, ESVUK).             RAZED                         I met a traveller from an antique land,             Who said – “Too right I’m angry, seething hot;             Far better had He smote me on the spot     ...