• Fiction - Religion

    The Sacramentality of “Things”

    December 29, 2012 - By 

    “What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live, coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don’t care about this so much anyway.” —From a 1988 interview with novelist Don DeLillo in Rolling Stone Just under a decade later, DeLillo gave us Underworld, his epochal novel whose first 84 pages contain an almost hypnotic, you-are-there account of the seventh game of the 1951 World Series and the pursuit of the Bobby…

  • Fiction - Religion

    Humanity Enraptured and Exposed: The Novels and Essays of Marilynne Robinson

    December 27, 2012 - By 

    A note to readers: This essay is both longer and more formal than pretty much everything that will follow it on this blog. (I promise.) But I spent a good part of the past year poring over Marilynne Robinson’s work as part of a reading group with two minister friends of mine, and I told myself I’d surely be damned if I didn’t express the product of those labors somewhere. (My friends agreed.) So here it is. *** With seven books in 31 years, Marilynne Robinson is far from our most prolific writer—but she is certainly one of our most…

  • Poetry

    The Poet Faces Death

    December 27, 2012 - By 

    As a Worship Associate in my church, I occasionally assist in services, like a high-level version of an altar boy from my Catholic boyhood. That means I get to do some reading and talking instead of leaving it all to the priest. One function is a brief personal reflection tied to the presenter’s sermon theme. The subject on this occasion was suffering and mortality, for which I used this achingly lovely poem by Susan Deborah King as grist for my comments which follow in the next post. If you prefer to listen to the poem and reflection, click on the…

  • Personal Reflections - Poetry

    On Mortality

    December 27, 2012 - By 

    I think you’ll be delighted to know that Susan Deborah King, the author of the poem we discussed in this space last week, “As Death Approaches” in the volume titled One-Breasted Woman (chronicling her near lethal battle with breast cancer), is alive and writing today, five years after publication. She even has a website currently “under construction,” and if that’s not a statement of faith in the future, I don’t know what is! I love the almost delirious gratitude of this poem, the surveying of her life’s riches even as death hovers behind her lost breast, her bald head, her…