A Generated Essay on the Sermon on the Mount, First Pass

The Sermon on the Mount is not a cheat sheet for the afterlife. It is a blueprint for right now: how to see, how to treat people, and how to build a life that stands when the weather turns. I read it this time without chapter breaks, the way its first hearers would have. Chapter numbers came twelve centuries later, and without them I had no idea I was nearly finished until the builders appeared. What I found was one continuous argument, each saying leaning on the one before it.

A Generated Essay on the One True Genre

I grew up in a faith that talks about the one true church. So it's not surprising that when I found alternative music, I didn't just find a genre I liked. I found the one true genre. For a lot of us raised Latter-day Saint in the 80s and 90s, alternative music arrived the way the gospel is supposed to arrive: as a discovery, a recognition, a sense that something real had been hidden in plain sight while everyone else was listening to the radio. Once you heard it, Top 40 sounded like what it was. Calculated. Market-tested. Eager to please. The Cure and Depeche Mode and the Smiths didn't sound like they were trying to please anybody. They sounded like they'd been given something and had to say it. We already had the vocabulary for that. Testimony. Revelation. Conversion. The difference between a man who teaches and a man who has seen. It didn't take much for that language to drift from Sunday into the stereo.