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Good Letters

The Creationist Crisis

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Recently my brother had a DNA test done to see what our nationality/ethnicity breakdown is. As it turned out, the DNA evidence totally refuted all the family stories we heard growing up, stories we told to ourselves and to others over the years.

Letting It All Hang Out

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I was zoning out at a red light when a shiny object—or, shall I say, two shiny objects—caught my eye. Dangling from the back of a pickup truck a pair of large metal testicles sparkled in the subzero sun. I shot a picture before the light turned green and posted it to Facebook when I…

A Blaze of Holy Unease, Part 2

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw creation as dynamic in matter and spirit, and understood the world and specifically human consciousness as continually evolving. He believed creation to be the process of divine incarnation, all of the world perpetually moving toward God. The process was not and could not yet be complete. As a result “nothing is profane here below for those who have eyes to see.” All is sacred.

A Blaze of Holy Unease, Part 1

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As I drove home from the Methow Valley a week ago, I listened to Krista Tippett interview Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. Around me the mountains of the Cascades softened as they declined into the Columbia River Valley, a part of the scablands of eastern Washington scoured by the Missoula flood during the Pleistocene Epoch.

The Second Coming of Flannery O’Connor

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The ongoing conversation about contemporary literature and faith that I have been having with Dana Gioia and Paul Elie across half a dozen print and online venues, though it has touched on a dozen different issues, ultimately comes down to one: “absence” versus “presence.” The question Elie has raised, you may recall, is whether we…

Beyond Sight: The Imago Dei Project

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Across separations of time, media, scale, and—most of all—intentionality, painter and glacier seemed to have stumbled upon the same set of formulas.

The Contemporary Novel of Belief, Part 2

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In yesterday’s post I wrote about author and critic Paul Elie’s contention that few contemporary writers depict characters struggling with religious belief in novels with contemporary settings. Among other things, I argued that his conviction that having a contemporary setting is somehow supremely valuable is both short-sighted and literalistic—that Elie has a rather narrow understanding…

The Contemporary Novel of Belief, Part 1

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Writing a response to a published essay can be seen as public service, a way of contributing to the larger cultural conversation. On the other hand, writing several responses within a relatively short period of time can easily come across as carping or sour grapes. That consideration is very much at the forefront of my…

Face to Face: The Imago Dei Project

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In November, I attended a colloquy presented by Image on Evolution and the Imago Dei: The Artist as Translator—a significant subject about which I could write pages. Instead, I am going to write about something simpler: the value of people coming together, to be near each other, to talk face to face.

Opting for Paradox: 25 Years of Image

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The poet Ezra Pound made the phrase “Make It New” the rallying cry of artistic modernism. In one of life’s little ironies, he obtained the phrase from an ancient Chinese text. It seems that every time you get excited about making it new, you are forced to recollect the words of another ancient, the moralist…

Good Letters

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For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for our blog. Every week gifted writers offer personal essays that make fresh connections between the world of faith and the world of art. We also publish interviews with artists who inspire and challenge us.

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