May you sleep in the shelter of the shadow of God’s wings, May you wake in the light of his love For a little more than a year I’ve been praying this blessing over my kids just before they drift off to sleep. I turn out the lights, sit on the edge of the bed,…
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Reading well makes travel meaningful. On a recent trip to Cappadocia, I traveled with Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus.
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Gardening isn’t an activity I typically associate with Jesus. But when Mary first encountered Jesus outside the empty tomb, she supposed he was the gardener. Is this strange case of mistaken identity accidental, or is there symbolic meaning that we shouldn’t miss?
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When I see Giacometti’s sculptures I don’t see anxiety, I see dignity. I don’t see alienation; I see presence. I don’t see frailty; I see endurance and resolve. I don’t see victims; I see survivors. These works have been “enthrallingly handled.” They have been loved into existence.
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Friends scatter grace through the ins and outs of weeks. And this friend, in particular, had been full of those daily graces that infuse joy into the routine of daily living. How do you say goodbye to a friend like that?
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Yesterday the arresting question, “Can we survive the visual tsunami?” showed up in my Twitter feed. The tinge of apocalyptic concern in the title of Mark Galli’s meditation for Christianity Today got my attention. Tsunami sounds bad. But for me, a designer who loves the arts, visual sounds good. I respect Mark Galli tremendously and…
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Five years ago I read W.H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, for the first time. I’ve found myself drawn to it during Advent every year since. His psychological insights into the players that populate the narrative breathe life into a story that often feels too familiar to fully appreciate. But it’s his meditation…
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“If one called this day the beginning and day of Orthodoxy (lest I say something excessive), one would not be far wrong. For though the time is short since the pride of the iconoclastic heresy has been reduced to ashes, and true religion has spread its light to the ends of the world, fired like…
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When I saw the Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, I had only known Hirst’s work from headlines. My impression from a few poor reproductions was that he was all about death. The retrospective told me that I had been, well, dead wrong. He has a lot to say about life and…
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Alice Neel was eighty years old when she resumed painting a self-portrait she had begun some four years earlier. In it she leans attentively forward, one eyebrow raised in critical assessment of her subject, glasses perched on her nose as if to sharpen her clarity of vision. She wields her paintbrush as a suggestion that…
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Tina Boesch 