Whatever the birds were
Like a spirited theological colloquy between two people
whose faith has failed,...
Chris Wiman's Christmas picks
A couple of years ago I ordered a book by Jen Hadfield on the strength of a vividly disgusting couplet I came across somewhere or other: “Under the broiler / turned sausages ejaculate.” (That’s ...
A man forgiven
Instead of sitting down to rage at a blank page again, I grabbed a copy of Don Quixote. Three days later, the ice of time had cracked.
Embrace & abandonment: A pastor and a poet talk about God
"We aren't the first people to experience God as the slice and the stitches at the exact same time. The paradox is ancient. Jesus embodied it."
Pain, prayer, poetry: An interview with Christian Wiman
“For decades there has been a premium on language as subject,” says poet Christian Wiman. But recently poets are “trying to find some way of speaking of ‘ultimate things’ with some sort of credibility.”
A break in the storm
My sorrow's flower was so small a joyIt took a winter seeing to see it as such.Numb, unsteady, stunned at all the evidenceOf winter's blind imperative to destroy,...
Gone for the day, she is the day
Dawn is a dog's yawn, spacein bed where a body should be,a nectared yard, night survivingin wires through which what voices,what needs already move--and the mind...
Doubts about prayer: Between action and contemplation
I have never felt comfortable praying. I almost feel I should put the word in quotes, as I'm never quite sure that what I do deserves the name.
CC recommends
Kamienska, who died in 1986, is well known in Poland, where her two volumes of intensely focused, intensely religious diaries have many admirers....
God is not beyond: Meditations of a modern believer
Are we condemned to be always anxious in our belief? Insofar as our efforts are directed inward, at appeasing or pacifying our own anxieties, the answer is yes. But when we allow our anxieties to become actions, when we perform concrete things in the name of faith, then we gradually begin to find ourselves inching forward on a rope ladder of action strung high over the abyss of unbelief, and our gaze becomes focused on what is ahead of us rather than forever staring paralyzed down.