Genesis - The Facebook Edition

I'm so glad I have access to David Sessions' Google status, or I would've missed this.

And speaking of our friends at Patrol Magazine, they have a terrific editorial on profanity and Christian magazines.

We've got a similar piece on censorship and profanity as it pertains to Burnside coming with the launch of our new site...stay tuned.

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Posted in: Jordan,patrol magazine

9/11

Relevant Magazine asked a few Burnside writers for short reflections on 9/11.

You can read those here.

We didn't have a ton of room, but I do want to mention how writing about 9/11 feels vaguely self-absorbed. I mean, think that day changed everyone on some level, but writing on how my thoughts about the world, politics, and war began to shift seem to pale in comparison to people who suffered directly, before and since.

(It's also a shame Susan Isaacs' memories weren't posted...she didn't have time to write a piece, but her story is in her book, and it's crazy.)

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Posted in: 9/11,Dan Gibson,David Johnson,David Zimmerman,John Pattison,Jordan,Relevant

"More coffee, hun?"

I�ve had many memories at Waffle House. But I�m guessing some of you have never even been to one before. For those who don't know, it's a 24 hour grease-pit. A southern staple of grits and hospitality. It originally began in a little suburb outside of Atlanta Georgia in 1955 and now reaches as far north as Pennsylvania / Rhode Island and stretches west to Arizona / Colorado. Sorry Portland, but Waffle House might be my favorite cup of coffee. The coffee is not good, it�s bland. But the atmosphere is ironically endearing in that white-trash sort of way. A classic American icon if you ask me.

With three of us at the table my friend looks at my other friend and says, �translate this for me, I�ve been wondering about this for a while.�

He glanced across my friend�s brand new MacBook Pro and starts translating arcane Greek sentences from the ancient Nicene Creed devised by the Romans in 325AD. This is a bedrock, if not the bedrock document securing the survival and health of Christendom.

From across the table I hear, f?? ?? f?t??, Te?? ???????? ?? Te?? ????????, ?e??????ta ?? p??????ta, ?�???s??? t? ?at??, d?' ?? t? p??ta ????et? . . . God from God, Light from Light . . .

In Waffle House, mind you, he starts telling us about the annoying propensity to which the Grecians utilized reflexive participles. A literary faux-pas if you ask him. I start laughing at the insanity of it all. I mean, a Waffle House is no place for a MacBook. Let alone an opinionated lecture on an archaic language. My life doesn 't make sense and I'm beginning to be okay with that.

And right before this happened on the same MacBook we purchased plane tickets from Shanghai to Xiamen (pronounced Shaw-Men) a paradise city located on the southern shores of China where we will be living and teaching English next week. A United States Passport and a Chase MasterCard were on the table trying to avoid coffee stains. Ten minutes before all this my friend was quoting Shakespearian Sonnets from his iPhone. This had to be the most sophisticated table in all of Waffle House history.

As we were laughing at this juxtaposition our waitress yelled across the room, �Good morning Duke!�

I looked up at Duke. Duke was more probably a local trucker. He had a Harley Davison hat with flames coming off the bill. A cigarette hung from his mouth and tattoos lined his arms. His black Sturgis t-shirt was tucked into his Brett Favre Wranglers but on his feet he did not have boots . . . on his feet he had flannel house shoes.

Duke garbled, �Good morning darlin.�

I later got in my car and followed my friend back to his house so he could use my car the next day. He was driving his mothers car at the time. And I passed a cop and panicked because my speedometer light is out in my hubcap-less 95� red Buick Skylark. I didn�t know how fast I was going. It was five in the morning. The story started swirling in my head, �Officer, we were just at Waffle House buying a plane ticket to China because we�ll be over there next week and my friend needs to use my car because he�s taking his mothers car back to her so she can go to work in a little bit. He needs to go to this bookstore in Fayetteville and buy himself a dry erase book with the 500 hundred most used Chinese characters in it. He�s really smart, he knows a lot about Koine Greek and Shakespeare and all...you know he's a good guy.�

And I�m sure he would have said something like, �Sir, I�ve heard a lot of stories in my day. Step out of your car.�

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Posted in: Eric Allen,Juxtaposition,Story,Waffle House

Teach Me To Pray

I write at a kitchen table. There are days when I'd love to have a writer's desk with an old Tiffany lamp perched just so and fountain pens in an empty soup can and copies of The New Yorker strewn about the edges and...but that would be someone else's story. I write at a kitchen table.

As I wrote yesterday, I could see him. Then he'd disappear. Then I'd see him again. Rising. Falling. Rising again. You see, his backyard has a trampoline, like our backyard does. I watched him turn flip after flip after flip, I bet twenty in a row, his eyes closed. He was poetry. Our trampoline has a black safety web that feeds our abandon. His does not; he jumps without a net.

The lights in his house stay on all night long and the windows are always, always open, every last one, and people are always yelling or screaming or crying or hollering. Sometimes, when I'm writing at the kitchen table in the wee small hours I see the lights and hear the sounds. Sometimes I stop writing and pray. There used to be a daddy in his house, but now he's gone. There were rumors about, well, they were rumors. Now there's a boyfriend in his house and rumors of marriage.

Sometimes I stop writing and wonder about him. It used to bug me that the lights stayed on all night but then I thought what if that's because a daddy loved darkness rather than light? That was the rumor. It doesn't bug me so much now, after that thought. And I used to wonder why he would spend long stretches of time doing flip after flip after flip. But then I thought sometimes even a new boyfriend can't put humpty together again and maybe he asks God to make him a bird so he can fly, fly away but God doesn't listen, so the closest he can get to the sky, to being untethered by the things of this world, is to barrel outside and close his eyes and spread his wings and jump without a net.

If I had that writer's desk like I mentioned, it would probably be tucked away in some corner of the house surrounded by books that reached to the ceiling. If I had that desk, I couldn't see Icarus; I wouldn't know how to pray.

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Wait a minute...THERE'S A WALL HERE!!!

AND IT'S NOT HOLDING BACK PALESTINIANS!!!

If there's a single area of the world I would infer would be completely covered by archaeologists, that single area would be Jerusalem.

You know what they say: when you infer, you make an in out of 'f' and 'er'.

But seriously, they just found a giant wall in Jerusalem. Now the maps in the back of every Bible ever have to be rewritten!!!

(When reached for comment, the Christian book industry simply said, "Cha-ching!".)

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Posted in: Christian Booksellers Association,history,Israel/Palestine,Jerusalem,Jordan