• Religion

    The Great Longing:
    Notes on Relationship and Community

    February 22, 2016 - By 

    “The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” —From Simone Weil’s “Waiting for God” (1951) As the Buddha let us know, the story of humanity is one long grappling with desire—mostly unfulfilled. This Great Longing projects itself in a million different forms, all of them stand-ins, in fundamental ways, for the eternal life human beings desire as conscious, self-aware creatures whose most painful and challenging awareness is of their own finitude. Our animal friends seek only their next meal, their…

  • Personal Reflections - Poetry - Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    The Hope in Wildness: A Poetic Homage to John Muir

    February 10, 2016 - By 

    “In God’s wildness is the hope of the world,” wrote John Muir while tramping through Alaska on a long mission to meet that hope on its own terms. Not to snub the majesty of perfect sunsets, Muir might hasten to add, but is there a nobler expression of divine engagement, of a super-charged world ripe and overflowing with portent and awe, than a severely blackened sky followed by lightning cascading across its canvas? Or even in suburbia, biking in a hot howling wind, when one forsakes actually getting anywhere, but instead peddles slowly, mouth agape at neighborhood trees gone horizontal…

  • Religion - Visual Arts

    The Bible Under the Bridge

    February 3, 2016 - By 

    A Bible, abandoned, tattered, weed-strewn. Found by Houston-area artist and photographer Patrick Feller as he climbed along a bank to get pictures of an old railroad bridge crossing Interstate 45. *** *** He had taken a different route when returning up the bank, through an overgrown area with thick vegetation and debris that suggested to him previous occupation by “those who had found some sort of shelter in the shade of this thicket.” The Bible was open, stiffly, to Joshua 18, a brief chapter in the Old Testament describing the division of land to seven tribes of Israel which had…