How overwhelming the first Christmas must have been for Mary and Joseph.

Over the past five decades liberation theologians have stressed the notion of Christian practice or praxis Greek for doing that is the notion that being a disciple of Jesus Christ requires action that is congruent with the Gospel discloses its truth and transforms society According to Gustavo

The Foley Poetry contest approaches, with entries accepted between Jan. 1 and March 31. I know how the outpouring of poems will eventually seem like what Robert Frost describes in After Apple Pickingthe rumbling sound of load on load of apples coming in. (The picker admits he is overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.)

What do I want to say now to improve the harvest? Mostly I want to observe, in the face of relaxed habits, that a decent paragraph of prose is not necessarily a poem. Typography can spread out a text attractively on the page, but that doesnt necessarily make it a poem. Besides pleasing visually, the poem should please the ear. Its intelligent design has to include, above all, a discernible music, some evident or subtle way that the words, phrases and lines are knit together for the ear.

This concern for regularities of sound does not rule out flashes of imagination, eloquence, wit and insight, which are the life blood of poems. But it is a reminder of the ears love of pattern, and that poetic artistry lies in elements, small or large, that repeat. In the older English verse, poetic form meant metricsa controlled alternation of stressed and unstressed syllablesand, except for blank verse, rhyme. Even now, songs, hymns, blues couplets and nursery rhymes hew closely to these standards. But for many writers today the fixed forms, like the rhymed quatrain, which Emily Dickinson managed so brilliantly, have become a straitjacket.

There are many alternatives for patterning sound. Consider the psalms. No one who prays the psalms will claim that they rhyme, but in a larger sense they do, strictly. Each line is immediately matched by another of equal length, which says the same thing in other words, or develops the statement, as in this verse of Psalm 107: God changed rivers into desert, / springs of water into thirsty ground. Shifts of thought and alterations of mood are needed to prevent monotony, but the pattern governs strongly. Also a number of psalms have repeated segments, i.e., refrains (e.g., Psalms 42, 43, 46, 67, 80), which function as echoes. Echoing is a great resource for poetry and song, as it is for rhetoric.

In modern poetry skill lies above all in management of the line. The ear has to be good at tying together sounds within the line, whether by alliteration or assonance (similar vowel sound) or by keeping a key word at the end of the line, which is the most emphatic place. In unrhymed poetry, the slight pause to dwell at the end of a line is a key to maintaining rhythm.

Somber though it is, the poem Driving Home by Charles Simic, (The New Yorker, 8/13), is a classic of intelligent design. Here is the first of two stanzas:

Minister of our coming doom,

Unless otherwise noted, information is from surveys filled out by the candidates, at www.vote-smart.org. • Total Number of Candidate Marriages: Giuliani and Kucinich have each been divorced twice, married three times; Gravel, Dodd, McCain and Thompson have each been divorced once, married twi

It is sometimes hard to believe that dirty-faced shepherds were Jesus' first royal retinue.

Flannery O’Connor died during the Second Vatican Council, while the bishops were writing anew what she had always known: that the church is the body of Christ, the people of God; that laypeople are its flesh and blood; and that the clergy and religious orders are its servant-leaders. While O&#

The social worker and I belonged to the same parish, but we were merely acquaintances. So I was surprised when she called to ask whether anyone at our farm might be willing to take in a mother who had given birth during the night. There were perhaps 50 committed adults living at Koinonia Partners In

Lourdes at 150: a pilgrims' guide, reviewed

Fatal Love In the Signs of the Times story about Franz Jägerstätter (11/12), the author writes, Blessed Jägerstätter was beatified as a martyr, which means he was killed out of hatred for the faith. In other words, someones hate got Franz into heaven. But such is decidedly not the case. It is in

Making the case for God

'The Golden Compass,' reviewed

It poured rain the entire day that Christmas in Georgia, but we never let it dampen our spirits. I was visiting close neighbors, Sam and Beth and their young son. The three of us had prepared a vegetarian feast of succulent grain dishes, vegetable medleys, fruits, nuts, goat cheese and breads, not t

Bishops Warn: Book Could Mislead Faithful A Vietnamese-American theologian’s 2004 book on religious pluralism contains “pervading ambiguities and equivocations that could easily confuse or mislead the faithful,” the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine said in a Dec. 10 statem

Sweden has a population of nine million, of whom approximately 150,000 are Catholic. , a German who is one of 17 Jesuits working there, has been serving in parish ministry in Sweden for 37 years. , an associate editor of America, spoke to Father Dietz recently about Christianity and secularization i

As I laid my cellphone on a bookshelf near the door and stepped outside into the late winter afternoon, I remember thinking, What can happen in just 30 minutes? True, my wife’s due date for our first child was just a few weeks away. It’s also true this fact made me quiver on occasion li

In Lost in the Cosmos Walker Percy recounts an incident when the great neuroscientist Sir John Eccles was greeted by boos and hisses at a Harvard lecture Eccles had committed the unpardonable sin of claiming that human self-consciousness was not reducible to the biochemistry of the brain The host

The America review of the controversial movie The Golden Compass is now out and can be found here The review focuses both on Phillip Pullman s novels and on the film which opened strongly but suffered an enormous drop in per-screen viewers after its first week Was its failure due to a

In case you missed it here s the latest news about our latest convert whose desire to become a Roman Catholic has been long rumored on both sides of the Pond Blair was received into the church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O Connor on Friday In the next issue of America dated Jan 7 2008 A

As America nears its 100th anniversary in April 2009 the magazine will be celebrating in a variety of ways both large and small One part of our celebration we re particularly excited about is the America Essay Contest Thanks to a generous donor we will be awarding 3 000 to the writer who mak