Issue 54

If a winter storm had ever toppled the blue spruce that towered over the Tandem nursing home, you would not have asked how old the tree was and by that mean a good life had been long enough. You would not have said the tree would no longer suffer indignities and use that to erase…

IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…

Some of MacMillan’s larger works—such as his song cycle Raising Sparks, or his Triduum—have something provocative, almost indecent about them. They make us, as poet Czeslaw Milosz put it, “blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.”

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. —Dostoyevsky How did I get so lucky to have my heart awakened to others and their suffering? —Pema Chödrön WHEN MY FATHER DIES, I may not know about it for days. The people at his…

Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape by Sam Fentress (David and Charles, 2007) I GREW UP outside Portage, Ohio, on an acre with corn fields on three sides and the county highway on the fourth. On our disused barn was a painted advertisement: CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. The enduring letters…

I think that I am primarily a storyteller. My function as a visual artist is to create a two-dimensional formal structure that will best contain the story being told. I am always trying to create a sense of space that has somehow been altered or transformed by an event. —James Munce THE LACONIC, SPARTAN PROSE above…

Godfried Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, has frequently been included on experts’ lists of the papabile (likely possibilities for selection as pope). An advocate for constructive engagement between the worlds of art and religion, Danneels has gained a hearing both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Christianity and human culture, he writes, have a shared…

on reading John F. Deane’s Manhandling the Deity “unholy” in the beginning ________“symphony” at the end their long joining through a gate and garden path through gorse and bog cotton and a world stilled for a second as if it had stopped breathing as if in the space between breaths the brain might float like…

Occult power of the alphabet— How it combines And recombines into words That resurrect the beloved Every time. ________Breaking open The dry bones of each Letter—seeking The secret of life That must be hidden inside. § Fate not just a pair of scissors Waiting at the end to cut the thread, But there at the…

“Great is thy faithfulness,” __Say the leaves to the light. “Oh God, my father,” __Says darkness to night. “There is no shadow,” __Says the eye to the sun. “Of turning with thee,” __As tears start to burn. “All I have needed,” __Says the sand to the storm. “Thy hand has provided,” __Say the combs to…