What is the difference between a god and a powerful alien? Can an android have a soul, or be considered a person with rights? Can we imagine biblical stories being retold in the distant future on planets far from Earth? Whether your interest is in Christianity in the future, or the Jedi in the present–and whether your interest in the Jedi is focused on real-world adherents or the fictional religion depicted on the silver screen–this book will he ...
Big on style, slight on substance: that has been a common charge over the years by critics of John Updike. In fact, however, John Updike is one of the most serious writers of modern times. Myth, as this book shows, unlocks his fictional universe and repeatedly breaks open the powerful themes in his literary parables of the gospel. Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike also includes a personal tribute to John Updike by his son David, two ...
The human experience is an intimate, tough, and, at times, hilarious conversation with what is familiar and what is mystery. Poetry at its best turns this conversation into art and teaches by example how to employ language creatively and courageously–even coyly–in exploring the full range of human response to whatever life may deliver. Certainly the biblical Psalms set the highest of standards in this regard. In Opening King David, Davis takes a ...
The Operation of Grace collects a decade's worth of essays by Gregory Wolfe taken from the pages of Image, the literary journal he founded more than a quarter century ago. As he notes in the preface, his Image editorials, while they cover a wide range of topics, focus on the intersection of «art, faith, and mystery.» Wolfe believes that art and religion, while hardly identical, offer illuminating analogies to one another–art deepening faith ...
Killer gales and orcas, slickrock and storm toads, blackbirds, junipers, bathroom lizards–terrifying beauty infuses these poems as they probe and praise the tidal rhythms of love and faith, long-term. Meet Dreamer and Bean: reveling in God, each other, and Creation. Belief falls away for one of them like the self-pruning limb of a cottonwood tree. Marooned in the slash, the pair must trailblaze common ground. A lyrical field guide for journey ma ...
Dunstan Thompson was an American poet of great promise who burst onto the Anglo-American literary scene during World War II. In the words of one contemporary, Thompson was one of the rising «stars of modern poetry,» a writer who might one day join the pantheon of poets like Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas. And yet Thompson more or less disappeared from public view by the early 1950s. After publishing two volumes ...
These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and faith. Set in shifting, vibrant spaces of a rich Kentucky landscape, and wrought with metaphysical crisis, this collection charts the slow, seismic shifts of growth bound up in understanding the nature of home. Dangling between struggle and tranquility, the poems in These Intricacies evoke a contemplative exploration of masculinity and vocation as the poe ...
In 1987, when Bryan Parys was four years old, his father Alfred pressed record on a tape player next to his hospital bed. He began leaving messages for his wife, three children, and anyone who wanted to know why his terminal cancer at age thirty-eight wouldn't shake his faith. «If God told me to walk into a fiery furnace, I'd do it,» he said, perhaps knowing that he would not walk back out. In Wake, Sleeper, Parys tries to unde ...
