Tony Woodlief | Author

The Artful Life

Traveling circles

So what do I have in common with Annie Dillard, Ron Hansen, Kathleen Norris, and Valerie Sayers? We’re all in Image Journal’s 20th-anniversary anthology, Bearing the Mystery. You should buy a copy.

The Glass Child

If you’re looking for a counterweight to my usual cheeriness, you might get yourself the latest issue of Ruminate, which has my short story, “The Glass Child.” Here’s the opening paragraph: This is the blood, David tells himself. He twists open the bottle and pours its dark content into a blue plastic cup. The label …

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Friendship

Some of you may enjoy my latest Wall Street Journal essay, about modern friendships. In a nutshell: though I have more Facebook friends than my four-year old Isaac, I’m pretty sure that’s a poor indication of who is more loved.

Shut it. Literally.

Okay, here’s the thing. “Literally” doesn’t mean “really.” It’s not a word that you put in front of some other words to show that, unlike the rest of your lackluster sentence, this is the part you really totally completely, like, absolutely mean. And it doesn’t mean figuratively, or metaphorically. “Literally” means that it actually happened. So …

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The books we don’t read

The most lied-about book in England? Orwell’s 1984. For me it’s business books. The only thing worse, I think, than reading The Black Swan would be having an enthusiast recount it to me chapter by chapter. So what books do you lie about reading?

On Christian Fiction, Part I: Bad Readers Make Bad Writers

There’s a debate in Christian writing circles arising out of the perceived difficulty of getting publishers under the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) umbrella to carry more “literary” work. The underlying conflict between literary and mass-market fiction has existed in one form or another long before the CBA took root, of course. The first time a …

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Renaissance Radical

Something that has always bothered me about the theological enterprise is an undercurrent of arrogance, the notion that we possess so clear a discernment that we can build mental boxes to contain the wild God of the ages. I once heard a sermon where the pastor quoted a brilliant theologian, who was commending Jesus for …

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