Articles

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer PERHAPS IT’S BEST to open with categories, with what this new book of Christian Wiman’s isn’t. My Bright Abyss isn’t a memoir, although elements of Wiman’s personal life emerge. Stories of his faith, marriage, family, grandmother, battle with blood cancer, and career as a poet weave themselves…

Power in the Blood: Hollywood and the Myth of Religious Violence   ON OPENING NIGHT of the 2012 South by Southwest Film Festival, I stood at the end of a line that wrapped around a couple blocks of downtown Austin, Texas. I was in town primarily for work, not festival fun, but I had finagled a…

Decay and Resurrection: An Engineer on the Ecosystem of Abandoned Buildings   THERE’S A DENTIST’S OFFICE captured in photographs that, along with a number of companion images, got quite a bit of circulation in print and on the internet a few years back. The narrow, confined operating room, nested high in an office tower, is…

AT THE TIME Emily Dickinson wrote many of her poems, Charles Darwin had just published The Origin of Species and Henry David Thoreau had just published On Walden Pond. And amidst all that publishing of independence and evolution, the scheduled creation of the world thrown into doubt, the need for community questioned, a singular woman sat behind…

The night of the Perseid shower, thick fog descended but I would not be denied. I had put the children to bed, knelt with them, and later in the quiet kitchen as tall red candles burned on the table between us, I’d listened to my wife’s sweet imprecations, her entreaties to see a physician. But…

A MURDERER was living around the corner—on Smith Street. I saw them filming America’s Most Wanted in front of his building,” said the old woman in the Key Food on Atlantic Avenue yesterday, talking to the manager in his booth. “You don’t know who is a killer today and who isn’t. Have a nice day.” And…

THE RELATIONSHIP between ethics and aesthetics has preoccupied me off and on since the summer of my eighteenth year. It was 1965, and I’d just returned from several months working as a volunteer in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama. I spent the majority of my time in jails. My reasons for driving…

AMID THE USUAL eclectic lower Manhattan gallery offerings of Swiss cow-decorated milk bottles, comic-book art of the Oism faith, and an installation of banners with bankrupt bank logos, the opening of the exhibition Redemption at Flowers in Chelsea last spring, featuring four huge oil paintings of Christ’s death and resurrection by Scottish artist Peter Howson, qualified as…

Of Mind and Matter The Art of Terry Maker   GALLERY-GOERS who stumbled unaware into Reckoning, a 2012 exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, could be forgiven for assuming that they were viewing a group show, not a retrospective of the work of Terry Maker. Nearly ten thousand feet of gallery space overflowed…

from the Colloquy of Aelfric (955–c. 1010) i. Fisherman Master: Would you catch a whale? Fisherman: No. Master: Why? Fisherman: Because it is a dangerous thing to catch a whale. How do you catch a whale? No net you could knit is large enough to contain it, no hook you fashion strong enough to tug…