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Allison Backous interviews the poet Christian Wiman about his work, his attention to lament and evil, and his perspective concerning the role of spirituality in contemporary American poetry.

To use “natural” as a synonym for “good” is almost a reflex for us.  We are the godchildren of the Romantics and Transcendentalists, the cultural and religious heirs of the ancient Hebrews whose God made the world and judged it “good.”   Nature is normative, sets us straight, shows us wisdom. “Come forth into the […]

The collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis spurs author Nancy Nordenson to reflect on her family, her story, and pancakes.

Here I am hunched over another impression of the brain with its wads of flat batting and weird yarn, thinking how can I read these films without a light board— (continue…) “Interpreting the Film” is a tragic poem about a different type of film, but a slight shift in the semantic domain of the word makes […]

Kirk Cameron is at it again. America’s leading . . . um . . . uh . . . wait, what . . . what has he done, again? What are his credentials? His area of expertise? Surely, there is a reason why his voice is being privileged over other human beings who are actually […]

In Part I of a three-part interview, Irish philosopher Richard Kearney discusses the themes of evil, ethics, and the imagination.

If you missed it, postmodernism died on September 24th, 2011.  Yup.  At least if you take the word of Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which opened its “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990” on that day. You can read about it here and here (and find that I shamelessly took their pics!). But if postmodernism is […]

The recent documentary If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, directed/produced/written/edited by Marshall Curry is destined to not garner the kind of attention it deserves. Groups like the ALF (Animal Liberation Front) and ELF are labelled terrorist organizations due to their destruction of private property, via arson and explosives, in an […]

In this adapted excerpt from his part memoir and part theological treatise, The Devil Wears Nada, Tripp York seeks out the Prince of Darkness by confronting a neo-druid and some Satanists.