On Turbulence: New Work in Translation by Hussein Barghouthi and Kim Hyesoon
By Culture Issue 118
I had a dream I got what I wanted: a baby, a silver necklace, and worldly success.
Read MoreAbsence and Desire: Kierkegaardian Silence in Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland
By Culture Issue 118
We watch as the cross is carried out of sight. The land is speaking here. It says: Be patient. You do not need this. You cannot tame me with this cross. You cannot replace me. Be still. Listen.
Read MoreGrief through a Glass, Darkly: Mourning with The Darjeeling Limited and The Patient
By Culture Issue 117
WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…
Read MoreCanyon of Voices: Robert Kyr’s Songs for a Stricken Planet
By Culture Issue 117
When I listen to the oratorio, I see the canyon in my mind. I hear the soundscape from which Robert created such a moving plea for ecological awareness and urgent action. That, I suppose, is as it should be, since the Chama has, in his own words, “flowed into nearly every piece I’ve written since 1993.
Read MoreThat Which Calls Us
By Culture Issue 115
The glory of the Father…is that with him we are never out of time. He is forever welcoming our response.
Read MoreMy Imperfect Offering
By Culture Issue 115
If anything is worth living for, worth singing an imperfect offering to, it is the low and the small.
Read MoreThe Other World, and This One: Immanent and Transcendent Tendencies in Contemporary Poetry
By Culture Issue 114
I look to poets not to confirm my ideas of the world and of God but to be shaken awake by their vision.
Read MoreComedies of Seeking: New Fiction at the Borderlands of Belief
By Culture Issue 114
Where else but in fiction—both reading and writing it—can one try on so many different kinds of salvation?
Read MoreAfter Disenchantment: C.S. Lewis, Sally Rooney, and the Perennial Hunger
By Culture Issue 113
Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.
Read MoreI Trust My Soul to Grace: Paul Schrader’s Religious Imagination
By Culture Issue 113
Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.
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