Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
Squiggles
“It’s always there, just below the surface. Sometimes as I’m praying a psalm or doing lectio, I’ll suddenly be brought back to my building-block days, my eyes skating along undifferentiated letters, mere interesting shapes. Squiggles. I skate along the surface of the text, instantly aware of how thin it is.”
Fumbling toward Ecstasy
A book review of Raïssa Maritain’s Poetry and Mysticism, published by Wiseblood with an introduction by James Matthew Wilson.
Europe in these times: Looking for signs
Kevin Duffy on the Hagia Sophia in its present state
Farm Foundation
For those of us who live once in flourishing but now hard-scrabble rural communities, the wreckage of the divorce between farm and family is profound and enduring. The heartbreak is as vivid as every abandoned farmhouse and boarded-up main street.
Between Heaven and Hell: Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda
Join us for an online seminar on Randy Boyagoda’s novel Dante’s Indiana
Wellspring: A Mother Artist Project
Wellspring: A Mother Artist Project seeks to support women as they answer their callings as mothers and creatives.
Faith & Athletics
Chasing impossible perfection as preparation for the only perfection that matters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The One Word We Hear in Pet Sounds
Is there a place in this world for a man like Brian Wilson?
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.
Hit me with wine / With water
The Poetry of Caitlin Smith Gilson
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.
On Reaching the June Moon
Watching a strawberry supermoon rise over Revere beach with Adriana Watkins
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.”
Finding Bethlehem
Denise Trull muses on grandfathers and home while contemplating the classic book, “A Woman Wrapped in Silence.”
Carving
Jeffrey Essman considers the way in which poems are carved from silence.