Culture

The contemporary poet Franz Wright expresses a sense of human life as a brief hiatus between an immense before and after. The cold and dark was Wright’s environment for decades of his life, starting from age eight, when divorce took his much-admired father, the poet James Wright, out of the ho

The summer solstice was around the corner, but our seasonal fog had not yet appeared. Instead, we were experiencing day after day of clear, brilliant skies. Without any shades on our second-story bedroom window, I could raise up my head at first light and survey from my pillow what seemed to be a ne

The books discussed in this article illustrate how Jews and Christians have repeatedly gone back to the Bible to shape their present and future. Though it is an ancient book, the Bible has always been and still remains a source of life, renewal and challenge. Alan D. Callahan’s The Talking Boo

I was introduced to Raimon Panikkar in the mid-1960’s by a colleague of mine, Thomas Berry, at Fordham University in the Bronx. While the three of us walked to a local restaurant for lunch, Panikkar sketched his whole concept of the world’s religions as expressions of the Trinity. In his

"Batter my heart, three-personed God." "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." "Slouching towards Bethlehem." In each generation, orthodox and maverick poets have offered fresh insights into age-old religious truths. George Herbert blazed new trails for devotio

Winston Churchill launched Operation Gomorrah, ordering high-explosive and incendiary bombs to be dropped on the city of Hamburg on July 24, 1943. Five days later more than 50,000 civilians were dead. Two-and-a-half years later, the city of Dresden, crowded with refugees and of little strategic impo

At the insistent urging of a motel clerk near the Minneapolis airport a few years ago, I took the motel shuttle to that temple of American consumerism, The Mall of America, even though, as I told the lady at the front desk, I am not a mall kind of a guy. After a few bewildering minutes of strolling

Writing a novel based on the Gospels is a tricky business, not only because the Gospels themselves are such special documents, but because the two literary forms have very different purposes. Both are narratives, of course, but the novel is, historically speaking, a relatively recent phenomenon and

Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” screamed Dylan Thomas, but he was only 37. W. B. Yeats’s “Old Pensioner” “spit into the face of Time/ That has transfigured me,” but Yeats was just 27. Shakespeare, dying at 52, knew better: his Lear and Prospero, in