Madness, Religion, and the Public Square
In the early 1990’s I ran a small landscaping business as a way to supplement my paltry salary as a Waldorf teacher. Coming home from a long day of planting arborvitae one steaming July...
The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Twenty-Eight (Rabia)
Rabia, depicted in an Islamic miniature
Image is in public domain (expired copyright)
Poem translated by Charles Upton from Persian
This week I'm still thinking about stars, but we've stepped back a few centuries to 717–801 C.E. to read the work of...
Unanswered Prayers
“I cannot believe that, seriously!”….I shrugged my head in disbelief. I had very successfully interviewed for a job, in a place I really wanted to live. It was close to my family, in a...
A Deep but Dazzling Darkness
I think one of the greatest of metaphysical poems is Henry Vaughan’s masterpiece “The Night.” The poem takes as its inspiration the scene from the third chapter of John, Nicodemus visiting Jesus by night....
The Other and Julian’s Promise
In contemporary discussions of religion and religious discourse the notion of God’s alterity, or “Otherness,” is often foregrounded. This rhetorical gesture, very nearly a commonplace, derives from the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas and...
There is No One at the Center of the Cross (Easter Meditation)
On the cross, Jesus said, "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do." Did he carry the sins of the world, or drop them?
The center of the cross is a place that...
Reading, Intimacy, Angels of Death
Reading, I think, is a fundamentally spiritual experience. The phenomenologist Georges Poulet once remarked that, when we read, another person’s “I” enters into our own souls. Think about it: when we read the word...
“The Shower Prayer” by Cristina M. R. Norcross
Please click on the link below to my official blog, Running on at the Ink, to read my latest poem, "The Shower Prayer." For a brief, poetic respite from the world through a meditation...