The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Check out this clip from the film “The Dead Poets Society”. 

For those of you who don’t want to subject yourself to Youtube, it is a classroom scene in which the teacher instructs a student to read aloud from the introduction to their class’ poetry textbook, an essay entitled “Understanding Poetry” by J. Evans Prichard Ph.D. In his essay, Prichard turns the understanding and appreciation of poetry into a simple algebraic equation, plotted on a two-dimensional graph. This so offends the teacher that he instructs the students to rip the essay out of their textbooks, and then tells them (with the help of Walt Whitman) that their appreciation and understanding of poetry arises not from the sharpness of their analytical abilities, but from the depths of their souls.

Palm/Passion Sunday; 24 March 2013

“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” the disciples cry out at Jesus rides into Jerusalem – just exactly what the angels sang at Jesus’ birth, way back in chapter 2 of Luke’s gospel. Concentrating on God’s radically offensive message of peace through weakness and reconciliation seems particularly appropriate for American Christians as we celebrate Palm/Passion Sunday so closely on the heels of the 10^th anniversary of our unwarranted invasion of Iraq. In March of 2003, Americans supported the invasion by a 2 to 1 margin. Today, in retrospect, those numbers are nearly reversed.