All by Steven Garber

On Honest Art

On Honest Art

Steven Garber
Bookish, Hospitality, Music, Place, Truth, Vocation

For a day we considered our deepest disposition, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve that we are: we compartmentalize, we believe one thing to be true and behave as if another thing is true, we say “This matters most!” and then live as if it doesn’t really. This tendency has profound implications, for learning, for labor, for love, for liturgy—for all of who we are, for all of how we live.

How do we begin to find our way to coherence? Can we even imagine a way of seeing and hearing that honestly connects what we believe with the way that we live?

When a Dream Becomes a Life

When a Dream Becomes a Life

Steven Garber
Stage & Screen, Vocation

Vocations are not occupations, though they are integrally woven together. To know the difference and the difference it makes is critical, and much of the grief we experience is borne of missing one for the other. Vocation is always the longer, deeper story of someone’s life; for Joy, she was always the creative creator of things she would make that the whole world would someday enjoy. Occupation is not that, but is more the way we describe the things we do along the way of life, entering into particular responsibilities and relationships that are ours, and while shaping and forming us, are more often than not signposts of the deeper vocation. They are not the point; they point to the point.

Repairing the World

Repairing the World

Steven Garber
Justice, Truth, Vocation

Even with the best hopes, the truest motives, we will get hurt, because the world is very messy. Stepping in, even with responsibility born of love, is never neat-and-clean. To take up the wounds of the world will wound us, as it did God himself — which is why the heart of our vocation must be the imitation of the vocation of God. Nothing else can so form us, nothing else can so sustain us. 

Don’t Leave Your Brains at the Box Office

Don’t Leave Your Brains at the Box Office

Steven Garber
Stage & Screen, Truth

For its two-plus hours, it is wonderfully done: beautifully imagined, well acted, tenderly told, and when it was all over I was pleased. There is no way that the complexity and nuance of the novel could be captured in a film. So the director and the screenwriter are making choices, for good or not, about how to the tell the story in a way that is fair, but is at the same time their own work of art, too. I get that, and I honor that.

But there was a false note.

On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

Steven Garber
Bookish, Truth

Each of these authors tell the truth about the human condition, so their books are “good” in the deepest and truest sense. Not ever moralizing, so that we feel the authors are cheating, insisting on a “Christian” voice that does not belong in the story, or even worse perhaps, a revising of honest faith that does not allow for the breadth and depth of human existence, glories and shames that we are.

The Epistemology of Love

The Epistemology of Love

Steven Garber
Truth

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.