equal treatment does not translate into equality;

There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do.

To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery.

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn’t.

John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”

Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through.

what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God, the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in “His” church. Such

as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class. The metaphorical intelligence that has pulled disparate elements together to make the poem is of no consequence.

These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all.