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Poetry Friday: “The Grackles”

By Betsy ShollApril 15, 2016

Here is a poem that silently enacts a conversion.  The poem starts off with a string of scornful terms for the speaker’s new neighbors, culminating in the almost mean pun on their child’s “grin” as “grim.” But right after this, the speaker begins to soften her terms: she notices a “warmth” in this noisy, dirty,…

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Choose Life, North Carolina

By Richard ChessApril 4, 2016

This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live. —Duet. 30:19 Once again, my state, North Carolina, has chosen to refuse life. This time in a hastily called emergency session of…

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Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry

By Morgan MeisMarch 15, 2016

The Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) is obviously not a religious institution. But damn if its Rivera Court doesn’t feel like sacred space. The Rivera Court consists of wall murals, floor to ceiling, around an indoor courtyard. The murals were painted by Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the famous Mexican muralist. Rivera himself was not an especially…

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Poetry in a Season of Lament, Part 2

By Sarah Arthur, Dick Allen, and Amit MajmudarFebruary 23, 2016

Two Poets Laureate On Grief, Detachment, and Finding New Ways to Live, Part 2 Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here.  Sarah Arthur: As Poet Laureate of Ohio, in what ways do you see the bardic role of the poet as “lamenter-in-chief” having changed over time? What role do you see a contemporary American poet…

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Everyone’s Waiting for the Victory Song

By Richard ChessFebruary 18, 2016

Everyone knows what happened. Everyone lifts a steaming spoon of cinnamon oatmeal to their lips. Everyone crosses “t”s. Everyone knows there’s blood on the fence in Wyoming. Everyone hears God in Charleston. Everyone knows what happened. Everyone tries to beat the nightly news home, but everyone knows the news, licensed to drive, drives everyone mad.…

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Creating Sacred Literature

By Morgan MeisFebruary 3, 2016

“We are just at the beginning,” Charles Taylor wrote in his lumpy but essential tome, A Secular Age, “of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.” If we are just at the beginning of a new age, it stands to reason that we are also at the ending of an…

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What Shall I Know at the End of My Days?

By Richard ChessJanuary 26, 2016

When I come to the end of my days, what shall I say I know of life in this world? And what shall God say, when the world comes to the end of days, that God has come to know of life in this one of all created worlds? Carolina chickadee, Kafka, vocoder.    I…

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For the Love of Hank Stuever, Part 2

By Caroline LangstonDecember 17, 2015

Continued from yesterday. Hank Stuever’s 2005 collection of essays Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere may not be the Good Book—as I said in the first part of this post—but you might be forgiven for thinking that I have treated it as such: My copy of the paperback edition’s spine was long…

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For the Love of Hank Stuever, Part 1

By Caroline LangstonDecember 16, 2015

It’s been a rotten day. The Fed Ex package didn’t arrive; a typo slipped through several levels of Edit. The leaf blower crapped out but not before spitting out a pile of half-masticated leaves onto the wet sidewalk, so that now the concrete looks like a rusted boat hull. The auditor is suspicious of that…

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The Greater Evil: Proscription or Compulsion?

By A.G. HarmonDecember 14, 2015

There’s a new law in China, and it’s aimed at weakening a faith. As the Chinese government is not one to bother with currying world opinion, those who speak for the authorities are quite aboveboard regarding exactly what they’re about and why: If a people are made to do something, they will soon enough not…

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