More on: Saint Francis

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…

THOUGHTS OF ETERNITY have always terrified me. Sometimes at night I would try to trick myself into imagining it, the experience of never-endingness, and think myself into a cold sweat, starting from the horror to which I had brought my mind. Most often, my late wife Emily was able to sleepily talk me back down, but…

The following remarks were given at Villa Agape in Florence, Italy, on the opening evening of Image’s Florence Seminar, September 14, 2008.   IMAGE is a journal devoted exclusively to contemporary literature and art—to the present moment—but here we are in the cradle of the Renaissance. We have not come out of mere antiquarian curiosity,…

I mean the kind saints praise and scripture calls blessed, the kind that inherits heaven where maybe what’s left of us will be more like a clear broth, than the vegetables and meat we chop here, as the radio blasts war, soup kitchen fills, and down the block a crowd gathers around two men yelling…

The following is adapted from a presentation given at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley in January 2015 during a convocation on the topic “Blessed Are You Poor: What Does It Mean to Be a Poor Church for the Poor?”   I SHOULD HAVE TOLD Father Michael Sweeney that if he really…