Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. […]

aaroncanipe: Jim Alinder Driving through America is the antidote to sentimentality.  Ecclesiastes 2: I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards:I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees:I […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfuwVnggIKM?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375] Christian Wiman delivers the commencement address at North Central College in Illinois. It’s disheartening watching peoples’ expressions as the best speech they’ve ever heard flies over their heads. Unfortunately, I probably would have ignored it as a 22-year-old college graduate, too. More unfortunately, in ten years, I’ll probably regret the things I ignored […]

Jacob Recalls the Fight at Peniel

by John Paisley (Click the author’s name for his biography) Upon that night the others were away – Wives, children, all the troubled world And I was there alone and quiet until he came Unheralded, mysterious. As one awaking from a dream I knew, at first, only that I struggled, then slowly Grew aware of my […]

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly […]

Further Out Into McCarthy’s Darkness (In Response to Ms Odradek)

Ms Odradek was kind enough to reply to my last post on Cormac McCarthy’s drive towards the dark by linking to her mini-review of “Outer Dark”. Read her review here.  This response is somewhat of an exploration that her review implicated in me. If Cormac McCarthy is writing tragedy for the purpose of catharsis, then […]

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. […]