More on: Editorial

The world warms up, the prairifire crabapple trees begin to drop their blossoms in almost technicolor puddles on the sidewalks in my neighborhood and, as if in concert, the base of my neck gets heavy and sore.

I’m always looking around for omens.

Really, this is why I’ve always loved and needed poems: they sustain the contemplative hours of the early, unbreeched morning, whenever you come to them.

Dwelling contemplatively is hard. The imagination is, for too many, a foreign country. Arguing about is easier than being. Perhaps this is true in the same way that it’s safer and more comfortable to talk about God than risk actual encounter.

When I go to the movies—well, when I go anywhere—Saint Augustine is always nearby. He lives in my head (and heart) rent free.

I did not expect a novel about a bisexual Latinx conceptual artist in Los Angeles to hinge on the question of whether art-making is compatible with motherhood. Then I read Yxta Maya Murray’s dazzling Art Is Everything.

Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?

The microcosmic richness of human identity is a reflection of the God who not only made us but sees us, knows us, and speaks to us. Our being addressed by the divine is an infinite well for human possibility.