More on: Essays

I WAS RAISED IN A FAMILY for whom our Baptist church was very much an extension of our home. While that church was—as I might now parse such matters—a particularly cranky Baptist church, it offered nonetheless a loving community to those within it. More importantly, that community offered me a first taste of what I…

From the narrow place, I called out to God; He answered me from the wideness of God. I OFFER THIS SOMEWHAT HOMELY, literal translation of Psalm 118, verse 5, because it seems to me—in its beautiful Hebrew, if not this clunky English version—to encapsulate what poetry is (or, at least, what it can be) more…

A POEM HAS CHANGED MY MIND about the Eucharist. For the better part of two decades—since I was baptized in a Cambridge college chapel, inaugurating my life not just as a Christian, but as a Christian of the Anglican-Episcopal sort—I have been mildly irked at my churches’ habit of using those small round wafers during…

I TELL THE STUDENTS in my theology classes that every choice of art in worship opens up and closes down possibilities for the formation of our humanity. Art is never neutral. It does things. The sixteenth-century poetry of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer does something to our brains, if neuroscientists are to be believed,…

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I heard—really heard—the refrain “Stand by me,” sung by a member of the choir at Saint Peter’s Baptist Church in the village of Allen in Clarke County, Alabama. The song had no ingrained meaning to me then. I recognized the hymn, but I did not know its power. I was…

THE PROSPECTUS FOR THIS SERIES of essays requests that I write about “some aspect of the way poetry and hymnody feed and nurture each other.” For someone whose mother often recited poetry and sang and played hymns to him, who has read poetry and sung hymns ever since, and has now been creating hymn texts…

IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT. Darkness creeps upon the city as folks rush about to parties and dinners. On one street corner, a group of worshippers gathers around a recently lit fire. Strange words are uttered over a colossal candle that will soon illuminate a pitch-black church. The worshippers shuffle in off the street, professing that Christ…

IN LATE OCTOBER I started painting the trim around the outside of the windows white. I finished the east and south sides of the house and moved my ladder to the west. The red leaves were falling from the sugar maple and the buckeyes from the buckeye tree, and the squirrels were making their strangely…