This past July on a warm summer afternoon, I attended a family friends’ poetry night—a classy little shindig with hors d’oeuvres, heels, sophisticated people, and, of course, poetry. A few months later, one of these poems unexpectedly resurfaced in a conversation with a friend. It was a poem entitled “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” by Christina Georgina Rossetti: You tell me that the world … Continue reading The World Is Fair, in Spite of the Old Fall

This is the cold time, the long time, the Lenten time. All of creation groans for new life, but the ground whispers, Not yet. All of God’s people groan for the final redemption, for the here-and-now of God-with-us, but the still, small voice whispers, Not yet. The Resurrection is coming. The Resurrection has come. From an eternal perspective, the Resurrection is. Christ cried, “Finished,” as … Continue reading In My End Is My Beginning: On the Mercy of Time in the Season of Lent

When an employee at Bordeaux University was told to rearrange the morbid artifacts of an out-of-the-way store closet full of shattered skulls, guns, hangman’s ropes, and aborted fetuses of siamese twins in 2009, he moved a few jars to find, on the back of the shelf, a tall, sealed beaker covered with decades of dust. It contained the lost amputated right leg of the great … Continue reading Leg in a Jar: The Amputation of the World’s Greatest Actress

“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” (Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray) The video opens with a typical vlog set-up: A woman sits centered in front of the camera, her pristine background out of focus. The Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic is enough to make any 22-year-old vaguely covetous. Her platinum blonde hair … Continue reading The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism