Voices in the Methow Valley
Spring in the Methow Valley of Northeastern Washington comes quietly, a gradual warming, winter grass rustling with the breezes carrying promise of new life. I am here for my first spring, though I’ve...
View ArticleMy God Is Better Than Yours
What a miracle! They had been freed, the Israelites, from Egypt, but moments after they set out on their way “home,” Pharaoh changed his mind, whipped his chariots and troops into a fury of pursuit and...
View ArticleMake It Old: A Wedding Anniversary Epithalamion
In the beginning was a wedding. The ceremony began with light. The ceremony included the separation of water from water, and it included the formation of land followed by the breaking apart of...
View ArticleLas Madres: Art and Death in the Arizona Desert
“The artist is a beggar because she is empty, waiting to be filled. But the artist is also… someone who is driven to go out to the margins of society in order to learn what the margins can teach those...
View ArticlePrayers in the River
I stand hip-deep in a river, casting into the eddies. I am not the kind of man who routinely stands hip-deep in anything, but the kids are still asleep, and I need to pray somewhere—God knows—so here I...
View ArticleA Conversation with Artist Natalie Settles, Part 1
This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation’s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily...
View ArticlePoets and Pope Embrace our Planet
Poets have no problem seeing the world evolving within God’s care. Okay, that’s too general a statement. Let’s just take some of the poets in the special issue of Image (#85) on “Evolution and the...
View ArticleMy Soul Thirsts
My children’s Michigan fact book says you can’t go more than eight miles without hitting water in this state, but it must be less this far north. I imagine the land shifting and disappearing beneath my...
View ArticlePeace, My Animal
“Benedic, anima mea,” I say each night to the mouse that lives behind my desk. I know what the phrase speaks of a soul, but “animal” often has more meaning to me than “soul.” Occasionally I quote Ada...
View ArticleChoose Life, North Carolina
This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live. —Duet. 30:19 Once again, my...
View ArticleCharles of the Desert
By Rebecca A. Spears One early June, traveling to a wedding in San Diego, I’d taken the long way from Dallas by train. I wanted to see the Southwestern deserts. Two days later Amtrak’s Sunset Limited...
View ArticleFinding Another World in Winterkill
“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats’s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ’s Incarnation; God dwells within our...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “The Moss Method”
I’ve long loved Pattiann Rogers’ poems: how they caress nature’s most minute details with acutely attentive language. Here, in “The Moss Method,” she focuses on one of nature’s most lowly living...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “Middle Distance, Morning” by Margaret Gibson
I read this poem as a meditation on how one can relate to the outside world without needing to possess it. A poem on how to let go: to connect beyond oneself without clutching. Here, the outside world...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “In the Beginning Was the Word” by Jeanne Murray Walker
I can’t begin to count the number of poems which offer their language to re-imagining the Genesis creation story—maybe because poetry itself is an act of creation. Jeanne Murray Walker’s creation...
View ArticlePurple Light in Sarajevo
My fellowship liaison, Sevko, drove, and his gaze flicked across teenagers spilling over the sidewalks. The center of town spread within the cradle of the mountains, lit by the pink and blue haze of...
View ArticleOdd Northern Indiana
Route 41 takes you along the coast of Lake Michigan out of Chicago. If you are trying to stay close to the lake, then veer off Route 41 at Whiting and tack southeast onto Route 20. That’s where the...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “Again to Port Soderick”
To behold God’s creation and to praise it with language is this poem—and it is also the poem’s subject. For what is God’s creation to the devoted poet but a reminder that, as a piece of that creation,...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “Sometimes I Am Permitted”
On my first reading of this poem, I felt disoriented by all the non sequiturs, all the disconnected images leaping here and there. But then I thought: isn’t this how my own attention works (or doesn’t...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “Recovery”
What I like about this poem is how it slides almost unnoticeably from a simple, upbeat view of life into increasing complexities and ambiguities. The title and opening stanza announce that this will be...
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