What shall I say, Lord, now that the wordskeep stumbling, tumbling like loose marblesacross the table then down onto the floor,bouncing and scattering this way and that? What shall I say as one after oneeach sound, each syllable, each sibilantcalls out before fading away? Two sisterslost now to . . . . Continue Reading »
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.—L. P. Hartley While drums pounded and cymbalsDrove men mad and bronze siege cannonPulverized walls built to last till the dayOf judgment, Fatih Mehmet—Shadow and Spirit of GodAmong men, Monarch of the Terrestrial Orb,Lord . . . . Continue Reading »
Living within a stone’s throw of the nation’s leading collection of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art housed at the Delaware Art Museum, I was familiar with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art but not his poetry. I therefore appreciate having been enlightened by Brian Patrick Eha’s “Rossetti the . . . . Continue Reading »
There’s a poem by John Donne that makes a presence of an absence; his absent love becomes as real to the speaker and more fully his than if she were present. This could illustrate what Katherine Rundell wants us to see in the work of John Donne, seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and preacher, . . . . Continue Reading »
The land is all alight with Easter colors,Tulips in pink and orange bending overThe clumps of daffodils just past first flowering.Even the tips of lilacs, rough and brittle,Begin to round themselves with pregnant green.But all this sinks, today, beneath new weightAs sudden blooms of white descend in . . . . Continue Reading »
And so, we’ve come to this,a new beginning in an end,and celebrate the way we didjust days ago, gathered closein that small room, what wedid not then know—that He would go, but come again,this morning, when we’d lostalmost all hope. We’d bowedour heads, confessed to sin,determined to go . . . . Continue Reading »
Clear water on a Catskill stream spills,flowing down a smooth rock faceinto a pool shaped like a cup held withinhigh rounded walls. A Chinese painting,think of that, fine brush strokes formingfissured cracks from which green fernsunfurl lace while light falls featheredthrough new leaves as I stand, . . . . Continue Reading »
The wind shears through hardwoods, then rain brings down the leaves here, eight thousand miles east oftheir archipelago of service, maplike now in its remoteness. Woodsmoke censes the air in the hermitage they . . . . Continue Reading »
For a magazine devoted to religion and public life, the piece by R. R. Reno entitled “Engines of Destruction” was rather strange (January 2024). Religious analysis was almost completely absent: Except for an attack on the positioning of Christian leaders and Pope Francis, it was . . . . Continue Reading »
Initially developed at the University of Toronto between the 1930s and 1970s, media ecology is a meta-disciplinary perspective that understands media as environments that shape human consciousness. Despite this expansive approach to media, media ecology has generally shied away from exploring that . . . . Continue Reading »
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