My husband George Dardess & I are writing a book together on beauty. Specifically on beauty as core to Christian faith and to Muslim faith—and to the arts inspired by each of these faiths. George’s special interest for over a decade has been Muslim-Christian relations, mine has been spirituality and the arts; so teaming up…

I was just finishing graduate school when the feminist movement began—around 1970. It spoke so powerfully to my personal experience that I wrote part of my dissertation on how the movement was transforming women’s language: allowing them to discover their own voice for the first time in Western history. As a brand new Asst. Professor…

Imagination has been a motif in Good Letters of late, so I was intrigued to hear a new variation on the theme in my pastor’s homily last Sunday. He began by quoting Shaw’s play St. Joan, from the scene where Joan of Arc is being interrogated: JOAN: I hear voices telling me what to do.…

As America magazine’s June 23-30 issue pointed out, it was extraordinary to find the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue (June 9 & 16) devoted so prominently to God, including a series of short reflections collectively entitled “Faith and Doubt.” Predictably, given its fundamental skepticism about religious matters, the New Yorker wouldn’t be able to conceive…

In the May 6 issue of Christian Century, several people in the book business (writers, editors, professors) were asked what sort of book they’d like to see written. I was struck particularly by the comments of Lil Copan, who is senior editor at Paraclete Press. Lil said that what she craves is books that will…

Springtime seems appropriate for considering poems about the Garden. I mean the Garden, the biblical one. Adam and Eve’s encounters there continue to fascinate poets, right up to Richard Jones’s “Adam Praises Eve” in the current issue of Image (#57). In Jones’s poem, what Adam is praising Eve for is her physical loveliness. “She is…

At a recent retreat that I was leading on meditating with poetry, a participant came up to me at break and said “but you’re going to distinguish poetry from prayer, aren’t you?—talk about how poetry is not the same as prayer?” I thought about this during the break, and flipped through the notebook I carry…

When a production of a classic play gets reported by Yahoo News, NPR, The New York Times, and the Seattle Times (off the AP wire), you know something powerful is going on. And so it was with the Classical Theater of Harlem’s performance of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans last November. Setting the play…

Reading Rafael Campo’s new book of poems, The Enemy (Duke UP, 2007), makes me appreciate what intriguing religious poetry can come from someone outside of conventional religious practice. Campo grew up in the Catholic church and culture of his Cuban-American community, but — according to his memoir-essay in The Poetry of Healing — he left…

“Desperately Seeking Silence” is the title of an intriguing essay in the current issue of Cross Currents (Fall, 2007). The author, Brett Esaki, who identifies himself as a member of the Hip-hop generation, argues that the noise we hear in youth culture’s art forms is actually creating a meditative space of silence for those who…