Articles

Now the lone swan dips groundward and her wings beat more slowly, the scrape of oak limbs wicking the air beneath her breast, the arms of oaks open and out, a narrow hall between their reaching (this the route through which the trees’ separateness wavers and grows tense). She is a clutter of feather, vision,…

Gethsemane’s sleepers, be with me If I sleep. Hypnopomps to the cock’s crow, To the olive grove’s Dawnshadows’ undergnarl. Skull-place, tricrossed, two-thieved hill, Over- Hang me if I wake.   † The bed-world Is the total part, Unrememberable mnemonics Muttered through the dream (Now I lay me, Tarry here awhile— Now I lay me Down—tarry…

I DECIDED that if I was going to read the Hebrew Bible, I was going to read the whole thing. Every word of it. No skipping over or skimming the genealogies, the instructions for building the temple, or the details of animal sacrifice. I bopped through the intricate plots of Genesis and Exodus, my rule…

MY FIRST CONVERSION took place when I was five years old on a heaven-reaching swing in my cousin’s back yard. It was a bright summer day and we had just returned from vacation Bible school at the Baptist church. Red cherry Kool-Aid stained our lips. Kristy was giving me an underdog—and I was swinging high enough…

A number of recent events suggest a revival of interest in the work of Georges Rouault is underway. Three in particular are worth noting: In 2008 a major exhibition, Mystic Masque, curated by Stephen Schloesser, was held at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College; a year later a joint exhibition of work by…

In November and December of 2009, the Dillon Gallery in New York City mounted a show called Soliloquies which featured the work of two artists of faith: the twentieth-century French painter Georges Rouault and contemporary Nihonga painter Makoto Fujimura. The show not only provided a fascinating glimpse into artistic influence, but helped to introduce a…

That evening she painted her nails metallic rose, placed the opal on her finger, and walked down the block to a party in the moss garden. A friend held her hand, getting involved with the milky luminescence of the ring. Before long he was telling her how his uncle loved to float down the river…

Bernadette walked from the kitchen singing “Hold On,” that song with a rising refrain. Her voice strong, she looked at each of us in turn: the woman with a bullet lodged in her head, one with a daughter dead a year, another whose unexplained anger flew loose daily. And me, the visitor trying to come…

When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…

There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…