Finding Another World in Winterkill

Last updated on: April 6, 2016 at 4:50 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats’s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ’s Incarnation; God dwells within our world, not separated from it; and so on. I believe these statements. Yet these formulations give me nothing to grasp onto, nothing to engage my imagination. How astonishingly rich, though, the other world “in this one” becomes in Todd Davis’s latest collection of poems, Winterkill, which takes Yeats’s line... Read more

Charles of the Desert

Last updated on: April 6, 2016 at 4:19 pm By Guest Contributor

By Rebecca A. Spears One early June, traveling to a wedding in San Diego, I’d taken the long way from Dallas by train. I wanted to see the Southwestern deserts. Two days later Amtrak’s Sunset Limited broke down in the Mojave Desert. Pretty quickly it became clear: We are not so great. Nature is. God is. Perhaps this is one reason why Charles de Foucauld went to live in the Sahara: not only to offer the people there hospitality and... Read more

A Strange Season for Inter-Christian Families

Last updated on: April 6, 2016 at 3:46 pm By Caroline Langston

American culture, at this late and plural hour, seems to have pretty well normalized the notion of the interfaith family, to the extent that if your environs are urban and/or coastal, and your circles revolve around the ranks of top- and second-tier universities, then the multiple-faith union is almost a given, and certainly not a problem. There’s now the cliché—which the Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network made a joke about—of Jewish boys and Chinese (Baptist? Confucian?) girls. There’s another... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975” by Bobby C. Rogers

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 12:25 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

This poem seems at first to be a straight-forward narrative: a childhood recollection of the men who smoked outside of church on Sundays. But the poetic shaping of the narrative adds another dimension. Those very, very long lines, the end of each spilling over grammatically into the next, even between stanzas: this gives the sense of the entire narrative as a single long breath—like the deep inhale and exhale of a drag on a cigarette. And finally, in the closing... Read more

Imitating the Saints

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 1:27 pm By Elizabeth Duffy

St. Therese once wished aloud that her own mother would die. When her mother scolded her, Therese explained that then she could sooner go to heaven. My children received this anecdote with perverse joy, telling their siblings to jump off a bridge, run out in the street, and let go of the tree branch…that you may sooner see paradise, of course. Given a choice between heaven and hell, they will gladly choose heaven. But faced with a choice between heaven... Read more

James Tate: Finding the Ultimate in the Ordinary

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 12:54 pm By Morgan Meis

The poet James Tate died last year. It happened in July. He was seventy-one years old. This, then, is the first Lent and Easter season we’ve been without him. Pity, that. Back some years ago, The Paris Review published a lovely conversation between Charles Simic and James Tate. Simic opens up the conversation by noting that Tate, in a poem called “South End,” defined the challenge of poetry as the following: “The challenge is always to find the ultimate in... Read more

A Dancing Christ

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 12:28 pm By Natalie Vestin

On Holy Saturday, I woke up at my sister’s house in northern Minnesota with a visual migraine, an aura with no consequent pain. They happen occasionally, and mine are always pretty textbook: wavy sparkling spirals and shimmering crystalline lamellae. The aura is technically termed a scintillating scotoma, a result of a sudden tidal wave of neurochemicals and sudden neuronal silence in the occipital cortex. It’s both a terrifying and a benign experience, due to the fact that it’s a “positive”... Read more

Choose Life, North Carolina

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 11:33 am By Richard Chess

This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live. —Duet. 30:19 Once again, my state, North Carolina, has chosen to refuse life. This time in a hastily called emergency session of the General Assembly, racing to beat the clock, the day when an ordinance to protect LGBT people from discrimination and to allow transgender people to... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Creed in the Santa Ana Winds” by Bronwen Butter Newcott

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 12:38 pm By Tania Runyan

Growing up in southern California, I experienced the uneasy allure of the Santa Ana’s hot fall and winter winds that swept down from Nevada’s Great Basin. They whipped up the dust and screamed against the windowpanes. In the drier mountain areas, they ignited fires; in my coastal town, they seemed to blow the stars through the air. As legendary as the full moon, the winds sparked dangers physical and fantastical. Did the fault lines lose their grip in the heat... Read more

A Rabbi, a Priest, and a Wedding: Part 2

Last updated on: March 29, 2016 at 12:52 pm By Guest Contributor

Read Part 1 here. By Danielle Leshaw Judaism tells us how to leave. Leaving the Sabbath. Leaving Israel. Leaving a marriage. Leaving life. We have rituals and words of prayer and entire theologies and words of wisdom about departure. Sometimes we leave with candles and sweet smells. Other times we depart with a divine request for safety as we journey. When leaving our spouse, we sign legal documents and ritualize the end just as we ritualized the beginning. And other... Read more