James K. A. Smith has been in the business of “translation” for many years. He translated Jean-Luc Marion’s important book The Crossing of the Visible from the French (1991), helping English readers gain access to Marion’s profound phenomenology as he applied it to painting, icons, and our imagistic culture. But Smith has much more often…

In what do we place our hope? We Christians know to answer, reflexively, “In Christ!” But in some sense that is not to take the question literally. The Light Between Truth and Reason If I’m honest, when I say, “I put my hope in Christ,” I’m in part treating the question as aspirational or normative,…

Marci Rae Johnson, Basic Disaster Supplies Kit: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2015) In Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, her second collection, Marci Rae Johnson explores love, parenthood, and the Christian life in the context of life on-line, reveling in the Internet’s speed, distortion, and telescoping of time and space. Her poems absorb and transform distant galaxies,…

As I prepare this post, it’s snowing outside—cold, white flakes that put me in mind of the flaky fires of the seventh circle of Hell. Today’s post is all about such unlikely juxtapositions of image and idea and our condition of interpretation. The Defiant Soul & the Old Man of Crete (Canto XIV) Capaneus Tries…

“More than anyone in my life, you have not only witnessed but pilgrimed with me in my singleness and now also in my relationship with my new husband. You have challenged me in sin, encouraged me to life, sharpened me through conflict, loved me deeply in listening and spoken God’s presence to me. . .…

Someone once said, “The seeds of change are planted in the questions that we ask.” If the statement is true, then we need to pay close attention to the questions themselves since they may give us a window into the world of people that we care about. Where do I belong? What is my purpose…

Sunday morning service had concluded, transitioning to a scene similar to church gatherings all over the world. Adults stood conversing, children ran laughing and playing, and the pastor extended warm welcomes to first-time visitors. I was one of those visitors, a guest speaker welcomed into the open-air church in the rural suburbs of Kampala, Uganda.…