Music of None Spirituality Music accompanies life because life—and creation itself—generates music, and cannot stop. At the moment of creation, God told Job so…
Albrecht Dürer (Stacey Bieler, 2017)
A restless craving for perfection Artists, like all of us, are partly a product of their time. Whether our posture towards the world is…
On Reading Augustine’s Confessions
Books / Faith / Spirituality
The uneasy feeling I had in anticipation of reading the Confessions was no surprise. I had read it before. It had stunned me—the beauty…
Poetry: The Cross
The Cross Streams of blood pattern like veins over sheared wood, dyeing the beams red where the rivulets ran, flowing through grooves in the…
No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (Rania Abouzeid, 2018)
Humanizing a brutal conflict The basic chronology is well known. In December 2010, a desperate street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in…
A Shout
From the falling form of an intricate vase water was freed, each flowing cluster and drop a complexity of light, color and motion spilling…
Silence and Beauty (Makoto Fujimura)
Quiet Wonder It is possible to get through life by skimming over the surface of reality. Most things in the world of advanced modernity…
The Porter’s Gate Work Songs (2017)
We Labor Unto Glory Add up the hours spent on our job (whatever it is) and the myriad tasks (whatever they are) that must…
Silence (Martin Scorcese, 2016)
The silence beyond all enduring I read Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence a few years after it was first published in English in 1969. I…
Sapiens (Yuval Harari, 2015) and Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, 2017)
A Secular Story Yuval Noah Harari, who teaches world history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knows the importance of myth and story. Ideas,…