Timothy Murphy left the the Catholic Church his junior year of college, in part because he saw the faith as incompatible with is homosexuality, and only began his journey back many years later after receiving a fateful call from an old friend just as he had loaded his double-barreled shotgun and was preparing to kill himself. Murphy’s beautiful poetry has appeared often in our pages, so we were delighted to read a profile of the man that recently appeared in Inforum.com, a Fargo news outlet:

Leaving the church his junior year of college wasn’t difficult, he said. As a homosexual, he’d felt alienated for some time.

His entire family – mother, father and siblings – drifted away, as well.

At 22, Murphy met his longtime literary partner, Alan Sullivan, then 24, and the two joined forces as poet and editor/translator.

Together, they pursued everything from Tibetan meditation and Zen Buddhism to Daoism and Confucianism.

“We were spiritual seekers, but we never looked to the Catholic Church because of their position on gays.”

After his conversion, Murphy became what he calls “a nut-job, evangelistic Catholic revert.”

It was a spiritual change his partner would later share, for similar reasons.

[. . .]

One day, he read an email from the same friend who’d pulled him from the brink – a former atheist who’d once convinced Murphy to join him but now was trying to convert him back to Christianity.

“I was responding in my usual defensive fashion when – bam! – I was blown out of my chair.

“And I heard this huge voice saying, ‘My son, my son, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” Murphy said, adding with a laugh, “Which proves that the only time God spoke to me out loud, he used the King James English.”

Murphy rushed to his keyboard, “typing as though by dictation” the quatrain that became part of his still-unpublished work, “Requited.”

The Lord of Hosts exists. I’ve heard his mighty angels sing.

When I toppled from his ramparts I heard their anthems ring.

I heard their wings beat round me in the centuries I fell,

and God means for me to sing my way from hell.

Two days later, he walked into Sts. Anne and Joachim Catholic Church in south Fargo and was received by a young pastor, the Rev. Robert Pecotte.

“He took one look at me and gave me the sacrament for the sick,” Murphy said. “I was shaking like a leaf from detoxing.”

After three weeks of confessing sins and receiving forgiveness, Murphy was admitted to full communion with the Catholic Church. He attended daily Mass for the next six years, having missed the previous 35.

His conversion is reflected in his double-volume book, “Mortal Stakes and Faint Thunder,” which includes as its first poem a suicide letter but ends on a high, hopeful note.

Read the rest about his amazing spiritual journey here. Murphy is an important voice among formal poets writing today, and we’ve been delighted to publish many of his poems (such as “Cathedral of the Prarie,” which unfortunately is the only one that we have available online). Knowing his moving life story will just make reading his work all the sweeter.

Lovers of Catholic fiction won’t want to miss out on a book giveaway taking place Tuesday and Wednesday (April 2nd and 3rd) of this week. Tuscany Press is releasing its first short story collection, the 2012 Tuscany Prize for Catholic Fiction, and to mark the event they are giving away free Kindle copies of the book on Amazon.com. Just stop by the book’s Amazon page (click here) on Tuesday or Thursday and enjoy. Those who do not have a Kindle reader can still download a free Kindle app for their tablet or PC, so  there’s no reason to miss out. Those who get the collection will also get a sneak peak of the Easter edition of Dappled Things, where we will be publishing the prize winning story, ”Eyes That Pour Forth,” as well as an interview with the editor, frequent DT contributor Joseph O’Brien.

With so many promising new ventures publishing such quality work, this is an exciting time for Catholic fiction.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a haunting rendering of Christ’s crucifixion in a little known four-page play entitled “Today is Friday,” originally published in the collection Men Without Women. The play begins in archetypal Hemingway fashion. The action is off-stage, has already happened. Three men enter a “drinking-place” at eleven o’clock at night, and immediately they talk liquor: “You tried the red?” the first man asks. “No, I ain’t tried it,” the second says. Soon their conversation is consumed by the day’s events. “He was pretty good in there today,” the first man contends. He could be describing a superior matador or a boxer. But he is not. And these are not the mob men of “The Killers” or the bull-fighting aficionados of “The Undefeated.” Nor are they the World War I-jaded soldiers of In Our Time. Rather, these three men are Roman soldiers, and we soon recognize them as those who crucified Christ. “Why didn’t he come down off the cross?” the second soldier asks. “He didn’t want to come down off the cross. That’s not his play,” the first suggests. “Show me a guy that doesn’t want to come down off the cross,” says the second soldier. As Matthew Nickel notes in his recently published Hemingway’s Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway:

The first [soldier] champions Jesus as the ultimate exemplar of grace under pressure with his litany repeated six times about how Jesus was “pretty good in there today”; the second soldier sees Jesus as a “false alarm,” mocking the first soldier as a “regular Christer” and finding nothing special in their day’s work; the third soldier seems to empathize the strongest with the crucified victims, expressing how he does not enjoy the “nailing them on” how it “must take some of them [the victims] pretty bad,” and how after the whole scene with Jesus he feels “like hell” (Nickel 90).

For Nickel, the hero of the short play is the third soldier, the man so sick he cannot drink. The everyman whose very life has been eclipsed by the revealed identity of Christ. The draft-title of the play was “One More for the Nazarene.” One more what? Nickel argues that the third soldier is this one more, one more soul salvaged by the cross. But to gain the full effect of the play, we must return to Hemingway’s final title: “Today is Friday.” The present tense is crucial, for it emphasizes “the present moment, today, as each time one revisits the story, like each annual celebration of ‘Good Friday,’ one relives the original Friday. Likewise, in the re-enactment of the Passion through the Mass on Good Friday, participants symbolically relive the moments of Christ’s passion and crucifixion” (Nickel 90-91).

In keeping with Hemingway’s masterly subtlety, the story defies explicit resolution. Ordinary, even banal conversations clash with the day’s horrific, salvific events. As the soldiers leave the drinking place the wine-seller asks the “Lootenant” whether he might be able to “have something on account,” to which the second soldier replies: “What the hell George! Wednesday’s payday.” The third soldier insists that the men return to the barracks. He is extremely weary. When this apparent hero articulates his agony the second soldier says, “You’ve been out here too long.” No, the third soldier says, “It ain’t just that. I feel like hell,” an insistence the second soldier smolders out with his “You’ve been out here too long. That’s all.” His relentless refusal to take the third soldier seriously elicits in the keen reader an even greater empathy and sorrow—for misfit amidst the soldiers, yes, but also, and perhaps more so for those who, beholding the paradox of Christ’s death-by-asphyxiation, subject what happened there to their own standards and measurements rather than subjecting themselves to the measurement of the crucified. As we approach the wood of the cross, today and every today that inhabits that Good Friday, may we know our own capacity to unknowingly nail Him there. And our only strength. To, like the third soldier, be made perfect in weakness.

-Joshua Hren

Ivan and Alyosha will be known to most of our readers as two iconic characters from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but it is also the name of a band from Seattle that seems to be bringing to the indie pop scene an approach similar to what Dappled Things tries to bring to literature. I recently ran into a short interview with them on Seattle Weekly that is well worth reading. They are particularly interesting to us because they are another example (others being Sufjan Stevens and Over the Rhine) of a certain breed of musician that is, as of yet, unfortunately too rare, and yet that we think should be much closer to the norm.

Ivan and Alyosha, you see, not only bring together amazing vocals, a unique, subtle sound, and beautifully poetic lyrics that have made them favorites in the indie music scene, but they are also committed Christians. As will easily be evident to anyone who is listening carefully, their faith plays an important role in their creative work, and yet, they are quick to point out, they do not make “Christian music.” For that we can thank God. They do not make Christian music in the same way Bach did not make Christian music: rather, Christianity entered organically into his artistic vision, and gave it much of its power. While Ivan and Alyosha have, musically speaking, little to do with Bach, their faith seems to play that same role in their work: deepening their vision, allowing them to produce music and write lyrics that reach straight into the human hart. Their song “Running for Cover” is a perfect example of that:

If I could wake my crooked heart
If I was there right from the start
To feel what it was like to be turned on

If you could fly the battling wind
To miss the mark correct within
If your wish came true, your dreams made real.

Running for cover
Running to hide

If I could be the walls of man
To rest my head and trust the plan
And fighting like a child to get my way

If I could see the garden place
Before the fall, would things have changed?
I wasn’t there, and neither were you
But I take the blame, as you should too, my friend.

Now we’re running for cover
Running to hide
Yeah, we’re running for cover
Running to hide

We’ve been trying with each other to unravel the age old story
But I’m starting to think that there’s a reason we don’t understand
And it’s easy to blame someone else for my wants and my worries
But I know, I accept that it’s just a part of who I am

Now we’re running for cover
Running to hide
And you say it’s not my problem
Out of sight, out of mind

Yes, we’re running for cover
Yeah, we’re running afraid
As we run with one another
Of the mess that we’ve made

Seattle Weekly makes note of the band’s uniqueness and asks some interesting follow up questions:

[T]he five members defy most stereotypes about musicians. For the most part, they’re family men: Four of the five members are married, James McAlister has one child, and Tim Wilson will be a father in April. They’re not heavy partiers: Tim Wilson jokes he “stayed up until 11 p.m.” for the band’s Christmas party last weekend. And all the members identify as Christians.

[. . .]

You’ve played at the Q Cafe before, which regularly books Christian bands. Why not try for a residency there instead of the High Dive?
Tim: We don’t want to be a youth group band, like an all-ages, youth group band.
Ryan: We want to make music for anyone, you know?
Tim: I think our market, too–I think we’re looking beyond Seattle in a sense. As far as I’m concerned, the idea is to reach an audience as big as possible, within independent music, and not sort of pigeonhole it.

Do you consider yourself a Christian band?
Tim Wilson: It shouldn’t really be an issue, if you’re a Christian.
James McAlister: [The Christian music industry] is kind of dead to us in a way… I’m sure it’s still happening somewhere, but it’s functionally dead. All that really demarcates in an industry, a kind of marketing.
Ryan: And we’re Christians, in a band. We’re not a Christian band. It’s a totally different thing, like writing a certain kind of song just for Christians.

Doesn’t it factor into your songs? One of the songs on your upcoming album is called “God or Man,” for example.
Tim: Yeah, it’s a part of our everyday life, you know? We write songs about our wives and kids that are on the way and situations we’re in and our friends and our faith. So, of course, it’s constantly a part of us, so it’s going to come out.
Pete: Anytime I listen to [a songwriter], and I don’t believe what they’re saying, or I don’t believe that they believe what they’re saying, it gets really boring. You want a band to be writing about what they care about or what they believe.
Tim: Maybe there are some bands that are afraid of it. But I think we’ve established that we’re not afraid of people knowing that. We’re just people trying to make records. Should it matter if we’re Christians or not?

Read more.

Hearing the words “Christian” and “music” in the same sentence should bring to mind quality and depth, not sappiness and clichés. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of a trend.

It seems the growth in interest in Catholic literature, which we’ve noticed since launching Dappled Things in 2005, continues apace. Now we have news that CatholicFiction.net, which focuses on reviews of classic and contemporary Catholic novels, has been relaunched and completely redesigned. The site was recently purchased by Tuscany Press, an exciting new venture that is sponsoring various prizes in Catholic fiction, and they’ve brought on some close friends of DT to serve as editors: Arthur Powers and Joseph O’Brien, whose work has often graced our pages.

The new site includes some interesting features like “Classic Wednesdays” and “Contemporary Sundays,” when fresh reviews of books old and new will be posted, as well as a Top 25 list of classic Catholic fiction (on a purely personal note, I have to say that I was a little distressed to find The Lord of the Rings all the way down at number 21), and some reviews by Flannery O’Connor herself.

They are also looking for people to become volunteer reviewers, so take note if you’re interested.

—BA

America’s Finest News Source reports that the ongoing gang war between AP Style and Chicago Manual members has claimed another four victims:

“At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,” said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word “anti-social” had been corrected to read “antisocial.”

Read more.

Even the dreaded MLA is now involved. In the meantime, the president, whose 2008 campaign slogan “Yes We Can” ignored comma placement rules in an effort at neutrality, has yet to pronounce himself on the matter. Congress, tied up in partisan squabbling, has been equally silent.

All we want to say is: Death to all enemies of Chicago Style! End the violence!

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21

Dear Readers,

How many billions, with a “b,” were spent during the last election? Whether your candidates won or lost, please consider the following question: now that the great electoral effort is over, are we any closer to a society in which the center of our common life is the truth that we are beings created in the image of God? If your answer to that question is in the negative, then we want you to consider supporting Dappled Things, a journal dedicated to transforming our culture. We believe that when a culture is not dehumanizing, but ennobling, electoral politics will take care of themselves.

There are, of course, many worthy ventures seeking your assistance at this time of the year, so let us lay out a few very clear reasons why we are worthy of your support:

1. There is simply no replacement for Dappled Things. We are the only Catholic journal in print today that is singularly devoted to literature and the arts. If you believe, like we do, that culture is the heart of our common life, then please consider that religion and the arts are the heart of culture. That’s where we come in.
2. Dappled Things is experiencing explosive growth. This year, we almost doubled our number of paid subscribers, while our number of Facebook followers nearly tripled to 1,184 (and counting). We are also receiving more and better submissions each month. While these developments are exciting, they also increase our costs beyond our current level of resources.
3. That said, Dappled Things is an extremely lean organization. Since we are run exclusively by volunteers, we are able to spend almost all of our funds on printing and distributing a journal that can rival in quality any of the most established literary journals out there.
4. We really do need your help. We can only reach out to a relatively small pool of donors, and we only make this one appeal per year. If it is not successful, we will simply not have the funds to make it all the way to next December. While we have now been able to start requesting foundation grants for special projects to further our mission, these grants can’t be applied to our regular expenses. Without your donation, we cannot operate. It’s that simple.

Every donation, of any size, makes a significant difference to us. However, for the appeal to be successful, we need a group of donors giving at a higher level. Are you in a position to give $250, $500, or even $750? These donations are crucial to us. Donors at this level make up our St. Francis de Sales Society, whose members are thanked in perpetuity in the print edition of the journal, and receive a signed, limited edition print of a piece of visual art published in Dappled Things. Please consider what donation level is right for you, and give as you are able.

Thank you in advance for your support. With your help we will be able to continue this valuable work.

Wishing you a blessed Christmas season and New Year,

Bernardo Aparicio García

President, Dappled Things

Prefer to donate by regular mail? Send your check, payable to Dappled Things Magazine, Inc., to: 600 Giltin Drive, Arlington, TX 76006.

“[Dappled Things] serves as one of the greatest outlets of Beauty — true Beauty mind you, which is ever distinct from prettiness — that I’ve ever known. Each issue contains a royal flush in the Catholic gamble with the modern world, in its poetry, short stories, essays, criticism, and artwork. Each issue awakens the soul to meet its Maker.” -Mark Barnes, Bad Catholic