Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
Of Humans and Kingfishers
How Man’s Final End Transcends the Created Cosmos
A private work of love
Celebrating the unheralded works of art that are far more meaningful than we think.
Hildegaard and the female voice
Denise Trull interviews Nori Fahrig, director of the women’s schola Polyhymnia, on the beauty and meaning of the female voice.
Europe in These Times: Rome of the North
Trier is often called the “Rome of the North” because of its large number of typical ruins from the time of that empire, including those of an amphitheater, baths, and—most visibly and uniquely—the fully intact and massive gate that once served as its entry point. This last is the Porta Nigra, dark and ominous at the end of a common pedestrian shopping street, a sentinel that still reminds the visitor that this was once a guarded place, where conquerors built and lived behind walls.
Native American Devotion at Mission Carmel Ruins
What Robert Louis Stevenson Saw at Mission Carmel on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo November 4, 1879
Invisible Boy
Elizabeth Leon peers through the tension of the visible and the invisible into the mysterious communion of saints.
My mother’s apricot jam
To me, like some third grade eucharistic ritual, my mother was the apricot jam. I wasn’t just eating a sandwich. I was eating the bread of my mother, eating her energy, her effort, her stigma of being the only working mom in my class, a mom who didn’t fit in with the tall blonde women in their designer clothes and fancy cars in the drop-off line. I noticed the grace and fire with which she moved through that cutthroat world and I loved her for it with every part of me.
A Swim in the pond in the rain
A “craft” approach to Great Books
The 2023 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is Open for Submissions!
The 2023 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is Open for Submissions!
A gaze that cannot look away
Denise Trull on how romance dwells in the realm of particulars.
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.