The Erasmus Option, Part 2

Last updated on: October 23, 2017 at 11:00 am By Gregory Wolfe

For Erasmus, Thomas More, and the other humanists of that era, literature and figurative language were the key to preventing people from falling into abstraction, moralism, and incessant warfare. Pagan literature, the humanists held, could be read with profit by Christians because it is possible to absorb and be enriched by the artistry without embracing false religious beliefs. In an early work, the Enchiridion, Erasmus said this classical literary heritage had the capacity to “mature us.” By grounding ideas in... Read more

The Erasmus Option, Part 1

Last updated on: October 25, 2017 at 1:32 pm By Gregory Wolfe

Picture The Old Humanist standing at his desk. The year is 1533. Desiderius Erasmus is living in Freiburg, as he says to a friend, “like a snail in its shell.” It’s another temporary stop on his long, peripatetic march through northern Europe, as he seeks to avoid persecution at the hands of Reformers and Catholics alike. He may be the most eminent scholar and writer of his generation, but the political and ecclesiastical situation in Europe is constantly shifting and... Read more

Fit For Transformation

Last updated on: October 24, 2017 at 10:17 am By Bryan Bliss

When my sister first told me about Orangetheory Fitness, I was intrigued. “You’d probably dig it,” she said. “It’s like personal training, but in a group.” Admittedly, it did sound like something I would like. But I was the heaviest I’d ever been and had spent the last three years committing myself to a level of inactivity that could only be described as inspired. Standing there with my wife waiting for the first class—they ask you arrive to thirty minutes... Read more

The Best in Bedtime Reading

Last updated on: October 23, 2017 at 8:02 am By Peggy Rosenthal

A therapist I once went to for help with insomnia advised me: “Stop reading a novel at bedtime; it stimulates the mind.” When I recounted this to my wise sister who knows me well, she protested: “No! A novel takes you out of yourself; that’s just what you want before trying to go to sleep.” My sister had it right. I dropped that therapist (saving, by the way, hundreds of dollars) and picked up my bedtime novel. Like poet Garret... Read more

Poetry Friday: “The Name of God”

Last updated on: October 20, 2017 at 10:07 am By Image

In Scripture, “the name of God” equals “the power of God.” Think of Jesus saying, in John’s Gospel, “I will do whatever you ask in my name” (14: 13-14). What Anya Silver does in this poem is invent a litany of extraordinary images for her personal relation to the name of God. She longs to “cradle the delicious name of God” in her mouth. She wants to breathe in the name of God as the ink of the Torah. She... Read more

How to Negate Hate

Last updated on: October 19, 2017 at 7:19 am By Guest Contributor

Recently I gave a talk to the freshman at a local college on the theme of negating hate. Their common reading this year was All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel set in World War I. The protagonist is a young soldier named Paul Baumer. A German. Our enemy in that war. To negate hate, the idea is, you have to get to know your enemy, see him as a human being. Turn the enemy into the... Read more

Looking For Release

Last updated on: October 18, 2017 at 7:54 am By Guest Contributor

This post originally appeared at Good Letters on May 9, 2012. Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was a habit that followed their family on the move to Sauk Village, to Jeffrey Street, where Dayne’s father bought a house and kept rusting car... Read more

Silent Mysteries

Last updated on: October 17, 2017 at 12:11 pm By Image

Lately, it seems, everyone is talking about silence—how they have less of it, how they wish they had more of it, how our Twittering lives have eaten away at some fundamental interior space that we didn’t even know was fragile to begin with. And the conversation about silence inspires its own cottage industry. You can purchase books on silence—both its history and its power. Beautiful movies have been released about suffering up against God’s silence, their accompanying soundtracks available for... Read more

The Arm, the Girl, and the Guard

Last updated on: October 16, 2017 at 9:46 am By Natalie Vestin

In a long room with three doorways in Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, somewhere in the humming midgut of the building, hangs an oil painting of a man’s arm holding a hammer above a length of chain. In front of the painting about three paces away is a twenty-two-year-old girl (her wording) who’s spent the past four months studying legislation for the prosecution of rape as a war crime during the Yugoslav Wars. About eight paces directly behind her... Read more

Poetry Friday: “The Anxiety Offices”

Last updated on: October 13, 2017 at 9:05 am By Image

Are any of us sleeping much lately? With such grief in the world right now, I suspect anxiety keeps a lot of us awake nights. What a rosary of sound and image Lisa Russ Spaar gives us to work through with this poem, beginning in the early evening of a sleepless night and ending with dawn. Ampersands replace conjunctions and each couplet spills into the next, giving us a spatial reflection of insomnia’s claustrophobia. And within the narrow confines of... Read more