Deep Down Things

Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.

Faith & Athletics
Gracjan Kraszewski Gracjan Kraszewski

Faith & Athletics

Chasing impossible perfection as preparation for the only perfection that matters.

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Doing Theology with Poetry
Abram Van Engen Abram Van Engen

Doing Theology with Poetry

Just as kingfishers catch flame or as a just man justices, so too do poems poem. They do what they say in such a way that the experience of the words brings alive the theology it conveys, so that the conveying is the living, the saying is the doing—the experience is the theology of the poem.

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The beauty of the Mass as antidote to anxiety
Denise Trull Denise Trull

The beauty of the Mass as antidote to anxiety

When I first attended Sunday Evening Mass, I fell asleep for a very brief space during the Canon so calmly and gently was it prayed. And I suddenly woke up about five minutes later feeling utterly refreshed. More refreshed than I had felt in years. This was what it was like to lack all anxiety. I almost cried for joy.

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Religion, Literature, and Reality
Michael Yost Michael Yost

Religion, Literature, and Reality

Michael Yost elaborates on how poetry is, or ought to be, governed not by a concern for expression, or mere recapitulation of experience, but of all the notes on the scale of being.

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Europe in These Times - Alone In the Gray City
Kevin Duffy Kevin Duffy

Europe in These Times - Alone In the Gray City

I am walking by myself through downtown Stuttgart, the clouds of the city’s seemingly ever-gray sky blunting the last of the day’s sunlight. It’s just past seven and the Saturday night Mass at the St. Maria Kirche has concluded.

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Music Lessons
David J. M. Herr SJ David J. M. Herr SJ

Music Lessons

I like arriving far too early for concerts to wait alone outside the locked doors of the symphony hall and hear the orchestra practice snippets of the concert to come. Sometimes it’s muffled but still powerful, like a thunder storm or erupting volcano in the distance, sometimes soft and delicate to force me forget all else and listen intently. I grow excited for what is to come, but the present moment itself is also precious. What I hear, though incomplete, is beautiful music. Life is being locked outside the hall.

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Europe in These Times: House of Terror
Kevin Duffy Kevin Duffy

Europe in These Times: House of Terror

A visitor to Hungary today will find, at both Gellért Hill and the street outside of the House of Terror, scenes that belie the difficulties faced there during both the Nazi and Soviet occupations.

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Creative Writing as a Liberal Art
Oso Guardiola Oso Guardiola

Creative Writing as a Liberal Art

Including literature in a Catholic liberal arts curriculum is useless if students are not taught to think liberally, to think lovingly, about literature. This might be done simply by working literary criticism into the curriculum, but any science teacher knows that students learn better with a lab. The workshop is the lab of criticism.

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Craft as a Liberal Art
Oso Guardiola Oso Guardiola

Craft as a Liberal Art

Oso Guardiola on the value of craft - “Without studying craft, assumptions about interpretation are made, and conclusions are drawn based on these assumptions. Reading, enjoying, feeling catharsis without craft is fine. Analyzing without craft is dangerous.”

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Finding Bethlehem
Denise Trull Denise Trull

Finding Bethlehem

Denise Trull muses on grandfathers and home while contemplating the classic book, “A Woman Wrapped in Silence.”

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Carving
Jeffrey Essmann Jeffrey Essmann

Carving

Jeffrey Essman considers the way in which poems are carved from silence.

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Forty
Allison Cundiff Allison Cundiff

Forty

Allison Cundiff thanks God for breaking apart her expectations for what a family should look like and what it means to welcome a little one into the world.

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The Finery of Tradition
Denise Trull Denise Trull

The Finery of Tradition

Denise Trull meditates on the importance of handing on a living tradition of sacred, decorative arts.

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