More on: church

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…

Revelation 3:1–6 Not much is left of this fourth-century stone church barnacled to the broken temple honoring the goddess Artemis. And this early synagogue partly restored. Moonlight dissolves the acropolis. The apostle drifts—a shadow, a ghost—past Roman baths, fragmented capitals of pillars, pagan altars. Past a gymnasium. His sandals tattered, old cloak stained. He is scouting…

Do you want to go back inside? the neighbor asks his small dun dog. Beauty, do you want to go inside? A long look at the tiny fluff, as if speech is imminent. As if anything is imminent. What would help you unpack the boxes? my therapist asks. Love. And I want an authentic relationship…

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…

She is a mother first—in every church she lights a candle for her harrowed son. One already lit supplies the match. Today San Stefano, above her stretched a heaven of dark keel vaulting. Here an icon, Byzantine, true presence in the church of the second Eve, the mother she beseeches. She gives a euro to…

My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…