The Potter
By Poetry Issue 62
So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw [her] working at the wheel. —Jeremiah 18:3 Coming in from the wind, disheveled, we cluster like commas around the woman at the wheel. Her foot…
Read MoreWhich I is I?
By Book Review Issue 82
Three Poetry Collections Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press, 2014) Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) F by Franz Wright (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) IN THE LONG HISTORY of the poetry of religious devotion, one often encounters a guileless representation of the self in its attempts to relate to the divine. The…
Read MoreMaking Meaning out of Music Or, Dancing about Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do
By Book Review Issue 86
Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) Writing the Record by Devon Powers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) ( ) by Ethan Hayden (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) AROUND THE TIME I started getting paychecks for writing about music, I tried to read the dense and difficult Aesthetics of Rock by the rock-critic-cum-philosopher…
Read MoreNight Vision: Jacques Maritain and the Meaning of Art
By Essay Issue 61
THE PEOPLE WE CALL artists have always gone into a dark space. A space turned inside-out. Not a somber space, where darkness is sadness, but a mysterious one—like the nighttime darkness of the imaginative child who marches golden caravans across his bedroom ceiling. The poet Homer, archetype of artists, was famously blind—yet out from his…
Read MoreOn Becoming Divine
By Essay Issue 69
On Becoming Divine: Within Theological School, and Without I HAVE NEVER BEEN smote on the head, or anywhere else, for that matter, with religious conviction. Yet, after years of milking cows, traveling, graduate study in poetry, teaching college writing, shoveling horse manure, and stints as a researcher and writer, I found myself applying to theological…
Read MoreFrom the Lines of Life: Guy Chase and the Art of the (Extra)Ordinary
By Essay Issue 72
Although preparation for this article began in 2008, by the time it was completed Guy Chase had begun to lose his fight with cancer. He approved a near-final draft a few months before slipping away in his sleep on August 18, 2011, at the age of fifty-six. I am for an art that grows…
Read MoreThe Mark of Cain
By Essay Issue 70
Figure and Landscape in the Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth….” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. —Genesis…
Read MoreSeven Years in Chelsea From Barricades to Beauty in New York’s Gallery Scene
By Essay Issue 74
TIRED OF THE THEORIES ABOUT ART, which I had either absorbed or spun myself, I did the decent thing at last. I took the inductive path—wandering the galleries themselves. Mockery had proven too facile, even if the offerings of New York galleries and museums had facilitated that posture. It left me hollow, especially after realizing…
Read MoreProfound Faith, Profound Beauty: The Life and Art of Sadao Watanabe
By Essay Issue 74
Sadao Watanabe (1913–96) was a printmaker celebrated internationally for his depictions of biblical subjects using traditional Japanese techniques. A longer version of this essay will appear in Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, published by Square Halo Books in conjunction with a traveling exhibit sponsored by Christians in the Visual Arts.…
Read MoreDecay and Resurrection
By Essay Issue 76
Decay and Resurrection: An Engineer on the Ecosystem of Abandoned Buildings THERE’S A DENTIST’S OFFICE captured in photographs that, along with a number of companion images, got quite a bit of circulation in print and on the internet a few years back. The narrow, confined operating room, nested high in an office tower, is…
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