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. […]

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 […]

…[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 […]

So noir exists as the fiction of moral breakdown, the fiction of corruption, and yes, the fiction of reprobation. To its practitioners, this also makes it realistic fiction, because it depicts the world—this side of Christ’s coming—as it truly is: not a realm of Newtonian regularity on the path to an ever brighter future, but […]

Conditions of Ambition #1

If my ambition, for my family; for my work; for my time is the kingdom of God, then my ambition becomes more an icon, and less an idol. If my ambition is the kingdom of God, then my family, work, and time must be a sign that points to something that ultimately gives my family, […]

From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end […]