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Good Letters

Disturbing the Silence: Part 1

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The cabin where my husband and I are having a weekend getaway is on the border of Wisconsin, on the lip of a rustic lake where two canoes stick out of the water like discolored buckteeth. They are tipped upside down at the crook of a thin tilted dock. When my husband turns one of…

Poetry Friday: “The Aging Maria”

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The prose poem is a challenging genre. After all, what distinguishes “plain prose” from “prose poetry”? Here, in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Aging Maria,” I’d say it’s, first, the liberty with sentence structure. Take the opening sentence: in a prose work we’d say it’s too long, stretches in too many directions. But here, each phrase…

Singing the Qur’an in Different Voices

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I sat through the meeting distracted, nervous. I should have been at ease. After all, I was with friends—members of a Christian-Muslim interfaith group, people I’d worked with for many years, people I trusted. But I was coming down with an acute case of performance anxiety. I had asked Ismet Akcin, the Islamic Center of…

Pascha, the Resurrection, and Ricky Gervais

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Rays of midmorning sun shone through the window and fell in molten pools across the white sheets of our bed. Lying back on my two feather pillows, I could hear and smell the burgeoning sounds of spring through my open windows—birds chirping, the scent of sweet olive, the soft susurration of car wheels on the…

Endurance Test

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My father held the wall to work his way from the bed to the couch, avoiding the ship’s bell protruding from the wall. He was sick—the kind of sick that meant out of work too. It was his adrenal system, or his pineal gland, or a hormonal imbalance, depending on the doctor. And it was…

Passover and Government Presence

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“In what ways do you experience the presence of government—city, county, state, federal—in your life, your daily life, your professional life?” That’s how we began, with that question. Asking questions, that’s the practice, isn’t it, that leads to liberation? And that’s why we were there that night, wasn’t it, to recount an experience of liberation…

Poetry Friday: “To Jenya on First Noticing the Dog’s Bowl of My Imagination”

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I was first drawn to this poem by Carol Ann Davis because of its long and curious title. Who is Jenya? How does imagination correspond to a dog’s bowl? The peculiarity of these details led me into a surprising poem of weighty questions and deep meditation. Davis asks, “My emptiness / loves yours. Can you…

Brunelleschi’s Balancing Act

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The story goes that one day Filippo Brunelleschi, the goldsmith who would go on to become the most important architect in Europe and arguably the originator of the Renaissance, devises a practical joke he and his buddies play on their mutual friend, Manetto the woodworker. The gist of it is that they contrive to convince…

When Art Disrupts Religion: An Interview with Philip Salim Francis

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Just released by Oxford University Press, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind has received praise from such leading scholars as David Morgan and Randall Balmer. Image editor Gregory Wolfe recently interviewed the author, Philip Salim Francis. Image: Your book has the provocative title When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the…

This Place is an Altar

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Pastor David—strong, sincere, and confident in his pressed shirt and polished shoes—greets me in the doorway. “This place,” he pauses, looking me in the eye, “is an altar.” He seems genuinely glad to have an American in attendance, but I am in an entirely different sort of mood. I’m in Kampala attempting to conduct research…

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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