Articles

The Portal of Beauty: Toward a Theology of Aesthetics By Bruno Forte Eerdmans, 2008 Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art By T.J. Gorringe Yale, 2011 Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination By Malcolm Guite Ashgate, 2010 Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality By Belden C. Lane Oxford,…

CHARLOTTE HAD NO NOTION of blasting the top off Major Tidwell’s tall and elaborate Woodmen of the World monument. It was shaped like a tree with its limbs sawn off and, as anyone could see, it was an easy mark. Under normal circumstances, she would never have dreamed of it. The only reason she did…

I’VE NEVER GIVEN myself an enema in front of anyone,” Christy says. We have arrived at a new stage in our friendship. And technically she’s not giving herself an enema in front of me. She readies what looks like a baster for a small turkey, and then I sit in the anteroom, next to the…

I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…

Chuck Colson I ARRIVE IN TORONTO during gay pride week. The lampposts lining the city streets fly rainbow flags. Inside the Sheraton are still more rainbows, small ones on sticks stuck into the mulched flowerbeds surrounding the ten-foot waterfall cascading into a pool edged with flagstones. Every time I see one, I can’t help wondering…

A merciless night here for the trees. At dawn: stripped bushes, ————————–strewn branches. Surveying the scatter for the unbroken, I come up with crows. It’s random on the face of it, this ruthlessness, ——————————————this rampage— like most of the world’s violence, much of its love. Still, after long safety, who can resist ———————————a good dies…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

I HAVE TRIED  to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don’t mean that Christianity doesn’t seem to “work” for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and reformed within…

THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…

Migrant Farm Workers, a Medieval Mystery Play, and the Future of Religious Art in America   ON A CLEAR, COLD DECEMBER evening a few weeks before last Christmas I sat in a 215-year-old adobe church and listened to the devil preach the gospel. The devil, or Luzbel as he was named in the play I…