Poetry is close to my heart. I would be lost without its very specific magic, its ability to spark wonder and shock and to open up fresh vistas on life in God. But as W. H. Auden famously says in his ...

Religious language, believing and non-. David Citino’s collection The Invention of Secrecy takes perhaps the most conventional route by presenting faith as something that has lapsed into an element of ...

Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology, edited by Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas, calls to mind the old quote attributed to Mark Twain, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." As ...

American poets pioneered free-form verse. Though Walt Whitman did write sometimes in traditional rhyme and meter, he is most famous for his stunning free-form poetry. It was controversial not only for ...

“In the particular is the universal,” said James Joyce. In Forest of Noise, the particular is the Israel-Hamas war and the suffering of the Gazans, as recorded by the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha ...

In the contemporary world, religious poetry is often dismissed as didactic or pietistic. But religious poetry in its themes and art is deeply allied to spirituality: Poetry's focus on meaning, ...

In Spencer Reece’s poem “Ayer,” from his new collection, Acts, the priest-poet talks about his bishop, who “had spent the day visiting churches/ and a gypsy that was begging for the host.” The worth ...

On the day that the poet Christian Wiman turned thirty-nine, he missed a phone call from his doctor. For months, he’d been playing with a bump above his collarbone, one so small he sometimes literally ...

To English poetry George Herbert made a notable contribution, — he devised the religious love-lyric. This forms his substantial claim to originality. To state, illustrate, and qualify that claim is ...

This poem was inspired by “The Religious Humbling of America; Faith can bring us back together,” Sapir, 6/9/26, in which Rabbi David Wolpe writes: The decline of religion in America is not a private ...

A pastor’s fresh vision for tired eyes. I was on a father-son trip with my eight-year-old son, Hank, when my hair started falling out. While taking a quick shower in the hotel room, I felt something ...