More on: Essays

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

It is difficult to find a language in which faith and science can speak to each other. For some, faith and science are competing systems of thought, and an intellectually responsible person must make a choice between them, especially when it comes to questions about the origins and development of life. For others, faith and…

IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind:  most of us don’t even…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…

Implicitry \im-‘pli-sət-trē\ noun L. 1. the study of the implied lives of trees. 2. the connection, at cellular or unnamed levels, between vegetable and animal entities. 3. involved in the nature of nature. 4. archaic: entwined with trees.   THE PHONE RINGS. An unfamiliar Florida area code; it could be an alligator or a mouse…

IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on…

IT IS A RARE mild September afternoon in Dallas when Kim Alexander sits me down. We are at her kitchen table, mere yards from her studio, which has spilled out of one spare bedroom into that familiar mid-mod home space, the den. In the regional vernacular for which we Texans are known but which we…

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 2009) Artworld Prestige by Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen (Oxford, 2013)   HOW MANY CONTEMPORARY American artists have you never heard of? Apparently a lot, if surveys are to be believed. A 2005 study by the NEA found that the number of artists in…

There is nothing new under the sun.                                 —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Behold, I make all things new.                                 —Revelation 21:5   TO CELEBRATE OUR twenty-fifth anniversary this year we chose the theme “Making It New.” It seemed a simple enough decision. This journal exists to publish art and literature that engage the western faith traditions in…