POTW: The Necessity for Irony
A reflection on Eavan Boland’s poem
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To Become a Thousand Men
– “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto“, or “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” – “Know thyself.” We are reading The Aeneid in my Ancient Literature class, and we’ve just spent a few days watching Troy burn to the ground. It is epic. Most of
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Reading is a Magical Thing–and That Goes for Scripture Too
Reading is really quite mysterious. We take it for granted, but the fact that a series of scrawled symbols and shapes stained on a piece of paper can transport us into the mind of another human being is rather magical. But I’ve also become aware that there are different kinds of reading, or different ways
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On Parables, Metaphors, and the True Joy of the Father
I’ve been reading in the gospel of Matthew recently, and I just went through the passages where Jesus has been using parables to teach the people. At one point Jesus’ disciples ask him (I imagine in a somewhat bewildered tone) why he is speaking to the people in parables. Jesus gives a mysterious answer that
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POTW: Lucy Shaw’s Mary’s Song
Mary’s Song by Lucy Shaw Blue homespun and the bend of my breast keep warm this small hot naked star fallen to my arms. (Rest… you who have had so far to come.) Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not
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On Calligraphy and Repentence
I had the privilege of attending the Odyssey book retreat in Blowing Rock this past summer, and it was life-altering in many ways. One morning, after a sumptuous breakfast, the group was settling down in the Kern’s living area in various cushioned chairs. I positioned myself so that I could see out the back doors
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The Problem with Form
“Form” is one of those words that has deepened the longer I have understood it. It was poetry that first opened my eyes to what that word really meant, but I see now that the importance of form transcends poetry and reaches into every aspect of life. My wife is currently reading a book called
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How To Mean What You Say
A conversation at a Christmas party this week sent me back to a book of essays by Owen Barfield entitled The Rediscovery of Meaning. My mind kept going back to this title, and I like it for several reasons: it affirms that there is meaning out there, and this meaning has at some point been
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On Plastic Bags, Sugar Cookies, and the Art of Giving Thanks
It’s funny how we change, the older we get. I am only 30 but I am continually surprised how every year seems to bring me exponentially farther from who I was before. Maybe time speeds up the longer you have been alive. Or maybe it slows down. It’s little things that surprise me, like plastic
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On Enthymemes and Technology
As rhetoric and arguments tend to come up in the classes that I teach, we invariably spend some time talking about enthymemes. An enthymeme is a specific type of logical argument–a syllogism–in which either a premise or the conclusion is left implied or unspoken. So, for example, the statement, “Josh is a good husband because
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The Genius of the Silmarillion
When I told my wife what this week’s poetry blog would be about, she said it was “a shameless plug for The Silmarillion. I told her that she was absolutely right. The Silmarillion is, I would argue, the most imaginative work of literature ever created. Whereas most mythologies are created by whole groups of people
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On Secular Form
In response to a previous post, someone put forward the sensible question, “What does ‘secular form’ mean? Is there actually such a thing?” I wrote a fairly lengthy response to this, but upon sending said response I found that it had been deleted. This post, therefore, will be aimed at exploring this question. The word