This poem is a meditation on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “The Last Supper.” But the meditation moves in an unexpected direction. The first stanza stays with the painting, though with a comical interpretation of “torn bread” scattered on the tablecloth. In stanza two, the poet moves to the wine—“or seeming / lack of it.”…

It was the summer of Leiby Kletzy, the eight-year-old Hasidic boy kidnapped from his Brooklyn neighborhood in broad daylight and brutally murdered. It was also the summer I almost lost my seven-year-old daughter Camille on a Toronto subway platform. When I turned, from inside the train, to see my daughter—outside, standing alone—my feet became bricks…

The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: I’m enjoying this conversation but at times I worry that you’re playing Glaucon to my Socrates. In other words, just egging the “master” on. I want to be sure you’re not just tossing up softballs for me to take a swing at.…

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, Thanks for your response to my latest “challenge,” as you put it, on the question of beauty. I love all the things you have to say and find myself both moved and convinced by the nuanced, complicated version of beauty you’ve…

They say God won’t let you go under; but it seems he will let your hair get pretty wet. Most trials, if they’re worthy of the name, don’t let you get away without a good scare, maybe even a rent garment and some scratches, if not scars. The less lucky might have to surrender more.…

This poem draws me in with its opening sounds: “Midnight, mid-May.” With those urgent, humming Ms, we are situated in a lush environment thick with potential, growth, and energy. Midnight is a hidden time, an hour when reader and speaker should be asleep. Instead, in this poem we stand alert to a late spring night…

I have had it with the rage. It might drive me off social media. At first, I thought it might just be a problem of living in metropolitan Washington, D.C., where the strident opinions held by many are usually interlinked with what they do for a living. No such luck, though: I’ve been on trips…

February is offseason in Rome, so today the city is a little gray, a little quiet, if ever it could be such a thing. I’m standing on the steps of San Luigi Dei Francesi church, buzzing a little from a sugary espresso. I’m gearing up to enter the church and see, for the fourth time…

“No, you should definitely major in English,” I told our babysitter, a high-school senior from our church who is considering an English or Communications degree. “Fiction is just like faith,” I said, “it’s its own kind of knowledge that makes our lives richer.” I really believe that, though I have to renew my conviction from…

I read through the article breathlessly, astonished at the moral implications of what I was learning. When I got to the end, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to begin to take in the import of what I’d just read. The article was “The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb,” by Thomas Powers,…