Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development with “In Memoriam”; there followed no reconciliation, no resolution. “And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,/ No choral salutation lure to light/ A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,”/ or rather with twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness nor the […]

…[An] image deeply embedded within the created order itself: that of new birth…Paul again uses the imagery of the Exodus from Egypt but this time in relation not to Jesus, nor even to ourselves, but to creation as a whole. Creation, he says (Romans 8:21) is in slavery at the moment, like the children of […]

…meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortal existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that […]

“It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of […]

Seeing Through Everything. And Seeing Nothing.

by Christopher Myers The benefit, of course, of seeing through everything is that not much is lost on you, and Franzen has an amazing ability to skewer hypocrisy and to layer everything in irony. In reading the novel though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation that to see through everything […]

Nature’s Grace: Encountering The Tree of Life

“Nature is shot through with grace, such that it is impossible to separate one from the other. Grace is not some alien force that occasionally intrudes into a closed system (“nature”). As G. M. Hopkins declared, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It is grace all the way down.” – Stewart Clem […]

Renaming the Reader

The Bible won’t be reduced to mere representations and symbols, although it has those. The Bible is much like the angel that Jacob wrestles, refusing to be pinned. Refusing to be named or seen completely. Able with a touch to ruin the reader and able to bless him forever. Even to rename the reader. And […]

You can write what you know. But you can also write to figure things out. It’s the difference between chasing butterflies and pinning them to a board. It loses something when you catch them. Josh Ritter in an interview with Tom Ashbrook on NPR’s On Point.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it… . A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only […]

The Baker and the Cupbearer

(Rudiments of reading) Simply as a piece of literature, the Holy Bible is a remarkable feat. Many different authors writing many different genres across many different geographical locations and thousands of years anthologized into an unbelievably consistent and unified work of literature. Contained in each smaller narrative are layers that point to a much larger […]