Christmas is for hoping in Christ’s return

“Whenever there is disaster,” he said, “it means a new day, a new life.” When he saw the tree decorated with the faces of the dead, he cried, he said. But he was where he belonged, he said. “We don’t have anything else,” he said, “just to pray and continue.” – A young Iraqi Christian […]

Journey of the Magi

By T.S. Eliot (Follow the link and listen to him read it). ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the […]

Ezekiel

By Ryan Culwell mystiplexed: Broke my hammer pounding words And sounding warnings seldom heard Forging bells out of rhyme While something older has occurred People swaying to my sirens And the rhythm of my work Singing oh how we love these love songs While I cut their heads off with my dirge

This is one way in which I would like to be remembered.

When we appreciate art, isn’t it partly for the experience of seeing something difficult done with grace? Isn’t it a perfect metaphor for how we wish life would be? Josh Ritter – I may be quoting Mr. Ritter here out of context, and certainly outside of his intention, but where his intention is well aimed, his […]

ON THANKSGIVING – …when Thanksgiving is secularized, what’s lost is precisely the Object to whom we would render gratitude. In other words, we end up being thankful for “gifts” without being able to recognize the Giver. So we come up with a substitute Giver, which is something like the idea of “America”–the land of the […]

Advent Sonnet #2 – Romans 1

Romans 1:3-4 O Messiah, Your prism mysteriesHave scattered the light ‘cross my feeble eyes.In my blinking, I’ve seen the strange storiesOf how one man born can be fathered twice. Son of Man, son of Adam, David’s son:Death spread to all men because we all sinned.You, grafted in, donned our skin to be undoneLike the oven-fired […]

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross (‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’), the cry which confesses that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the […]

MFA vs. NYC

I aim to exist somewhere in between.  MFA vs. NYC

We don’t live in the garden of Eden, and art that attempts to do so quickly becomes flaccid and trivial. But art, like philosophy and politics, often swings the other way and determinedly responds to ugliness with more ugliness. So we are here on the fault line between those who refuse to recognize evil, on […]