I’ve always loved Advent’s “O” Antiphons. These are the prayers traditionally voiced during the final seven days of Advent, prior to singing the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. Each of these antiphons begins with “O” and is addressed to Christ under one of his names mentioned in the Bible. They are brief, one-sentence prayers of longing…

Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. Of all Gospel passages, I think the Annunciation is the scene most represented by poets over the centuries. So I’m always amazed when a new poet has the confidence and vision…

Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. This poem is crafted as a conversation: among an unspecified “they,” an unspecified “we,” and God. The “we” is skeptical about the good actions traditionally attributed to God. (“From nothing God…

Recently, I spent a good part of three weeks promoting an event that my parish was sponsoring: sending out email blasts, networking, posting the event on Facebook. I’m on the committee that arranged the event, and I volunteered to do the advertising. As I did this tedious task, I tried to remind myself: Every moment…

My daily bike-ride near downtown Tucson is not picturesque. It’s along a bike trail that’s squeezed between a highway and a tattered string of small factories and beaten down neighborhoods. The bike trail is usually fairly abandoned when I ride it. Occasionally I’ll pass another biker or someone walking. But I can always count on…

Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. I like a poem to surprise me, and Marjorie Stelmach’s “Canticle of Want” (Image issue 86)  is full of the unexpected. Recently I’ve been praying St. Francis’s famous “Canticle”: “All praise be…

Are you as numb to news of war as I am? We the American public are so used to hearing that our country is acting militarily in yet another place on the globe that we don’t even question whether we should be arming the Saudi Arabian forces in Yemen or “supporting” Syrian so-called moderate rebels.…

I get tingly with anticipation when I’m about to meet a new poet. I don’t mean the poet in person; I mean meeting the poems of someone whose work had been unknown to me. And so it was when I opened the new selection of poems by Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last is Love, just…

I was reading Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when I began an article called “What is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” Published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the article is by Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society, and…

Underlying what’s wrong with this picture is where it resides. Not in a museum of racist caricatures. No, it’s on the popular Dentzel Carousel at Ontario Beach Park in my city: Rochester, New York.