More on: art and faith

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…

Your eyes are a brocade of finches, feathered bronze and gold-flecked shards of stained glass, afloat in pails of morning’s milk. Your pupils are black as onyx, as distant stars moments beyond collapse. I enter through them to find, in a barn lit through rafters, the Son of Man with mud dripping from his hands.…

If you have no voice after reading Rumi     to a dying man you hardly know, this is a good and timely thing. Pay attention. If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital     for two days, end up staying ten, you are the wind that rocks me forward. There are lights in the city…

Autumn came before I realized.                Sharpness flew up like gull-cries, the swan turned upside down in the water, pulling up grass,                rolling its big hips upward, which made me wonder if words are necessary for pleasure, if                without them, sparkles on the water would be useless baubles. I have so many of…

When he was only four, his mother spoke to him in Latin and a sacrament of Greek, the music of the dead tongues raised up to speak for the root of all. How proud they were, mother and son, bound by rule and the game it made, the bread they broke, word by word, on…

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…

Bathrooms are the best locale. All that waste and water and getting clean. Or trains. The nearly equal passengers. A phone rings in the kitchen but no one picks it up. Milk goes bad at room temp. You don’t check your email anymore. Could only scrawl a message: “I____you with all my harm.” Each day…

What became of the nice pagan girl I married? you complained one morning after I’d found my way to the church down the street and kept walking back every Sabbath. Over dinner you’d quiz me on the sermon, argue with the absent preacher, and me if I defended his BS. Maybe you resented any other…

Some of the things I was not doing at the age of twenty-two: learning the Latin names of flowers (or even their English ones) living abroad recording music with the intensity & abandon you hear on every single cut of At Last! on which Riley Hampton’s orchestra’s a tame & obliging brook under storm-spew’d sheets…

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…