creative nonfiction – Page 2

The year in numbers

Another end-of-year wrap-up that nobody asked for.

I’m not going to bore you with some tale of woe about all the personal life challenges 2025 brought to me and my loved ones. We all face those, year in and year out, and some years are tougher than others, and in the end, it’s all relative. Suffice it to say that I’m a fortunate person and I try to be grateful for all of life’s blessings.

So instead, I will bore you with a listicle about my year in writing.

Essay: Joe Strummer, punk prophet

Reposting an old essay on the 23rd anniversary of The Clash front man’s death

NOTE: Soon after Joe Strummer’s death of an apparent heart attack on this date in 2002, I wrote about The Clash co-founder’s influence as a prophetic voice in the world of punk rock and beyond. My attempts to connect Strummer’s musicianship with Christian theology might be a stretch, but it was a fun thought experiment and I enjoyed exploring those tenuous connections on the page (or the screen). I offer it here as my tribute to Strummer, who, in my opinion, embodied the spirit of ’77 punk rock and infused it with global sounds and a politically progressive worldview that is as needed today as ever.

Earlier versions of the essay below were published in 2003 in the online Christian/emerging church publications RELEVANT and The Phantom Tollbooth.