Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly […]

poetrysince1912: The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger for faith — and the challenges of faith — for people living now. After a Texas upbringing soaked in a history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture, he was agnostic until he became actively religious again in his late 30s. Then he was […]

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a […]

Horae Canonicae – Sext

W.H. Auden I You need not see what someone is doingto know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes:a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision,a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression,forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is,that eye-on-the-object look. […]

Horae Canonicae – Terce

W.H. Auden After shaking paws with his dog,(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,)The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;He does not know yet who will be providedTo do the high works of Justice with:Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom,(Today she has one of her headaches)With a sigh […]

Horae Canonicae – Prime

W.H. Auden Simultaneously, as soundlessly,Spontaneously, suddenlyAs, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kindGates of the body fly openTo its world beyond, the gates of the mind,The horn gate and the ivory gateSwing to, swing shut, instantaneouslyQuell the nocturnal rummageOf its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,Ill-natured and second-rate,Disenfranchised, widowed and orphanedBy an historical mistake:Recalled from the shades […]

Beauty & Justice

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. –  Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992. […]

Harold Bloom on the Future of the Novel

INTERVIEWER: What direction do you see the form taking? BLOOM: I would suppose that in America we are leaning more and more towards terrible millennial visions. I would even expect a religious dimension, a satiric dimension, an even more apocalyptic dimension than we have been accustomed to. I would expect the mode of fantasy to […]

I do not find, on the whole, that evangelicals are prone to unaffected removal from the world. Their world-loving God calls loudly. […] I find a great deal of intense, honest, and communal introspection—a passionate and persistent ambivalence toward the self that is of a piece with their passionate and persistent ambivalence toward their world. […]

More fearful than a final sleep, to me, is indefinite wakefulness in a world where the body can be kept plodding along, but no doctor can mend the riven heart of man. Tony Woodlief. Frozen Heads and Riven Hearts. Image Journal Blog. September 6, 2011. The past few posts have been about the new hopeful eschatology […]