I’ve decided that joy is a strange thing. We can experience joy apart from happiness. Sometimes joy leaks into our lives in the midst of sufferings and sometimes in erupts in the most mundane moments of our day. For such a short word, the meaning of joy seems vast enough to contain the simultaneous contraries of peace and pain, levity and weight, both longing and fulfillment. For Christmas, a friend offered me a companion in...
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Fruit of Lips is biblical theology done in the mode of T.S. Eliot. The Four Quartets is the only thing like it that I have read. The title comes from the promise in Isaiah 57.19, “I create the fruit of lips,” and its fulfillment in ecclesial life in Hebrews 13.15, “Through Jesus, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.” The book is a...
It’s no secret that some of the best books are children’s books. A few weeks ago, I was asked: “If someone were to really get to know you, what three books (besides the Bible) would they really need to read?” (Great conversation question, right?) My husband and I tried to answer for each other to see how close we came to guessing what the other had in mind. Richard’s guessed Dante’s The Divine Comedy, T.S....
The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416 I Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes, unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant: and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all language can name or fail to name, unutterable swarming of molecules. All Pascal imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine is known to exceed his dread. And there’s the earth of our daily history, its memories, its present filled with the...
As a student devoted to the intersection of theology and literature I’m always assessing ways in which literature accomplishes theological work and how theological thought appears in literary form. Most often these points of conversion occur by means of metaphor. To refresh your memory, metaphor is a kind of comparison in which one thing is described as another. Metaphor can be as colloquial as “love is war” or lengthy and complex underpinning an entire narrative....
Our imaginings of the afterlife often include getting answers to questions the knowledge and experience of the world couldn’t answer. Likewise, the pilgrim of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy seeks out heavenly wisdom to satisfy his own burning question: How is God just if people who never received knowledge of Christ’s salvation or the opportunity for baptism are condemned? In Canto 20, the souls represented in the heavenly sphere of Jupiter direct the pilgrim’s attention to...
“Lex orandi, lex credendi.” Or so goes the ancient Christian maxim, loosely translated, “As we worship, so we believe.” If the songs we sing shape the way we think, we should be very thoughtful about the way our churches are led in worship. Songs are short, memorable, and have the capacity to pack in a lot of ideas. Arius, the brilliant 5th century heretic, popularized his ideas with catchy songs and hymns. Marketing teams have...
When I was in high school, our music classes were in danger of being cancelled. I’ll never forget the night I played fly-on-the-wall at a school board meeting while the powerful adults discussed the future of our program. Silent the entire time, I went home that night and cried – I had failed to speak up for the program I loved. What if my failure to speak up meant the end of the music program!...
There are so many weddings in June. The arrival of the long-expected day and the celebration of unity contains, in part, a kind of poetic enchantment that lingers like the small flames of tea lights on the banquet tables. I taste, if just for an evening, a sip of greater beauty. Then I drive home, change laundry, and decide to wait on the dishes sitting in the sink shabbily dressed with the grotesque remains of dried...
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