Eleven different poetry collections reviewed by four America editors offer a sample of the God-haunted and the God-hunted contemporary literary artists who work out their spiritual, intellectual and emotional conundrums through lyrical compositions.

For Kavanaugh, the only true response to our consumer culture is the life of Christ: inviting, healing, self-sacrificing, loving.

Life is just a very terrible thing at times, and Christ knew it and we know it and the church seems to know it. The church is something that deals, quite unflinchingly, in reality.

Oh the poor starving Africans! the six of us looking at each other like are you kidding me...

Why is it this way? It is the child’s most basic question, dealing with the most bewildering thing of all.

As churches have opened up all over the country, there has been a particularly powerful and graced “letting go” available for some Catholics.

A Reflection for the Feast of St. Ambrose

Christ bursts into the manger, quickened into cows

This is the prayer: Accept things as they are. It was all meant to be.

Poetry is an attempt to say the unsayable, to capture what ultimately eludes.