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SubscribeA Conversation with Michael Gruber
By Interview Issue 91
A former marine biologist, cook, speechwriter, and White House policy advisor, Michael Gruber is a New York Times–bestselling writer who work infuses genre fiction with philosophical and supernatural themes. His books include the Jimmy Paz trilogy (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones, and Night of the Jaguar) and thrillers about Shakespeare (The Book of Air…
Read MoreIn the House of God
By Poetry Issue 89
The child who knelt before the wooden altar painted without passion finishes his prayers _______________ and gets up cramped what shakes the skies? Miserable skies that _______________ spill their dregs while I take refuge under the eaves of God’s house ____________ and that don’t clear up I don’t drink you from the chalice that the…
Read MoreAuthorized Versions
By Issue 35
AT the height of the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, a writer friend of mine told me that the whole sorry situation had her in a “white rage.” I knew exactly what she meant: like most people who have lived through these interminable revelations, I have found myself speechless with fury against…
Read MoreStrange Pilgrims
By Essay Issue 42
IN HIS his masterful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (reviewed in this issue), Paul Elie has crafted a braided narrative about the lives and works of four twentieth-century American Catholic writers, all of whom have become canonical figures: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The first sentence of…
Read MoreCurrent Event
By Essay Issue 45
HE SAID he never intended to found anything, and I believe him. But he had a gift for friendship. When his funeral mass was celebrated in Milan last month, thirty thousand of his companions were there. The principal celebrant, Cardinal Ratzinger, delivered a message from another friend, Karol Wojtyla. It may be a truism to…
Read MoreBent Body, Lamb
By Essay Issue 88
THE LAST TIME I TELL ANYONE I don’t believe in God is the summer before ninth grade. My mother and I are lying in my parents’ bed, still awake at three a.m. This is how we spend almost every night that July, because it is a hundred degrees even in the dark, and the casts on…
Read MoreThe Icon
By Poetry Issue 54
The face of the Madonna with child makes a dark mirror of what you are to feel: the temporary but desperate way a part of you is wounded until the hurt becomes a lens. Inside you is a city the mosaic spells out with tiny precious stones across the ceiling and the walls, beginning with…
Read MoreA Conversation with Godfried Cardinal Danneels
By Interview Issue 54
Godfried Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, has frequently been included on experts’ lists of the papabile (likely possibilities for selection as pope). An advocate for constructive engagement between the worlds of art and religion, Danneels has gained a hearing both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Christianity and human culture, he writes, have a shared…
Read MoreCandy and Copenhagen: Encountering the Art of Jonathan Castellino
By Essay Issue 86
The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…
Read MoreThe Spirit of Promise
By Poetry Issue 57
Amazing how the prayers come back, ———the cues to stand and kneel and sit, the hymns rising after so many years into the air of this small old church. ———We lean together in summer sunlight as the priest wafts past in an incense cloud and the small choir ———sings off-key in corner light. Yesterday you…
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