Manifestation
Ferment, Roxy Paine, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Spirit, you do not strike down the center of my body and convulse me into praise. You hook me like a dendrite branch, slowly,...
View ArticleTaking Semiotics to Church: A Review of Crystal Downing’s Changing Signs of...
Crystal L. Downing. Changing Signs of Truth: A Christian Introduction to the Semiotics of Communication. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012. Crystal Downing offers an entertaining and anecdotally...
View ArticlePrays Best while Moving
I prayed better when the children were small, when we spread out the crayons in the center of the dining table and crafted leaf rubbings. When we modeled shapes from colored beeswax, and I’d find...
View ArticleFor Hannah
I couldn’t pray. I tried. In the family waiting room, elbows propped on the plastic seats, I bent my head, opened my mouth, and waited. Then I stood and left. Back in the room, I joined my wife....
View ArticleLearning to Pray
Through twenty years and three kitchens my refrigerator door has been graced by a copy of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” On most days, I consider the pivotal lines “I don’t know exactly what a...
View ArticleI Love You: An Interview with Dominique Ovalle
Dominique Ovalle is a Californian artist whose work sparks with luscious texture and color and a search for absolute purity of form. She primarily works with oil on canvas, but she also experiments...
View ArticleMission and the Priesthood of the Christ
One does not have to hang around the church very long to hear some weird stuff.1 For example, when I converted to Protestantism, one of the dominant narratives as I picked it up—usually via some kind...
View ArticleKurt Simonson: A Thin Silence
Cultivated from his experiences at L’Abri communities in England and Sweden, these works from Kurt Simonson document place, community, and beyond—the presence of things mystical in life’s ordinary...
View ArticleLike a Day I Never Knew
Sunday, an old hat, strong perfume drifting like incense over the altar and pews. Stop this ritual. Take back its Latin chant. I say the rosary. I cover my head. I put coins in the...
View Articlesilent wealth
I wrote my love an electronic letter you are the loneliness which I have felt so deeply letters on a moonwhite screen where are the leaves on the wind and he replied it seems that I am always in your...
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