Helmut Stephan Diedrich (German, 1937–), Kreuzfall, 1964. Lithograph, edition 62/100.
You fall, sparrow-bone, God-eyed leaf, black hair of ox, kernel of wheat, gold blown from the stalk. You lift wood, trudge, and lurch, your back pulped. You would spit up the cup-dregs for relief—
but no, you want not; you believe your master’s dream. You toss your dreams like chaff to the breeze. You lift wood. You fall,
thin coin,
widow’s all,
copper seed into the mouth of the box. She brushed you a hundred times, so good to hold, but better to drop. Wood weights you, snapped bone, wind-flung leaf. You fall.
This poem was originally published in Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010) and is anthologized in Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, ed. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner (Abilene Christian University Press, 2012). Used by permission of the poet.
Originating in the Middle Ages, the Stations of the Cross is a Christian devotional practice in which participants commemorate the journey Jesus took down the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) to his death—either on location in the Holy Land, physically following a demarcated route, or, more accessibly, in their imaginations, through the aid of images or meditative texts. Traditionally, there are fourteen stations, the third, seventh, and ninth of which are “Jesus falls.” At these stopping places, Christians reflect on the crushing weight of sin and wood, on Jesus’s intensifying exhaustion, and yet, too, on his perseverance to get up each time and, pushing through the debility, to continue his trek to its fatal, foreordained end.
In his poem “Sparrow Lament,” William Woolfitt alludes to Jesus’s three falls on his way to Golgotha: “You fall,” “You fall,” “You fall.” He uses a string of metaphors from the natural world for the falling Christ: He’s a sparrow bone (spat out by a predator?), a floating leaf, a shed bovine hair, a grain of wheat blown loose from its stalk. These are wistful images of solitariness, passage, decease—and yet the descriptor “God-eyed” indicates that the path Christ is on is governed by divine providence.
The sparrow reference, given further weight by its use in the poem’s title, evokes Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 10:28–31: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
The Father has willed the Son to drink the bitter cup of suffering and death, which, despite Jesus’s distressed plea less than twenty-four hours prior that the cup be removed, he downs in trust, casting off any dreams he had for living into old age. As he carries out his calling, he stumbles, he falls to the ground—but not apart from the will of his Father.
In the middle of the poem, the lineation—the arrangement of words using lines and line breaks—mimics a downward motion. Like the drop of the storied widow’s coin into the offering box (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). Most biblical interpreters assume that Mary, Jesus’s mother, was a widow by the time Jesus started his ministry, since Joseph is never mentioned in any of the Gospel accounts after the episode of Jesus disappearing in the temple at age twelve. Woolfitt refers to Jesus as “widow’s all”—Mary’s everything, her firstborn son, whom she sacrificially gives to the world, knowing God will bless her gift. She doesn’t hoard this dear treasure of hers. She surrenders him to God’s greater plan.
It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Mothers instinctively want to hold on to their children, and tight. Many intrusively fear dropping them as infants and would do anything to spare them pain. Well, Mary drops her son, on purpose. She relinquishes him, “copper seed,” whose death bears fruit, yields dividends.
William Woolfitt is a writer across the genres of poetry, fiction, and essay. His poetry collections are The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point, 2024), Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer, 2020), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete, 2016), and Beauty Strip (Texas Review, 2014). He is an associate professor of creative writing at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and two children. He founded and edits Speaking of Marvels, a blog that features interviews with authors of chapbooks, novellas, and books of assorted lengths.
There are hundreds of creative works I could feature on the topic of Christ’s wounds. Here are just a few of note.
ARTICLE: “‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe” by Johanna Pollick, Emily Poore, Sophie Sexon, and Sara Stradal: In this three-part collaborative essay, I was most intrigued, in part because of its newness to me, by the first section, “The flowering wound: Christ’s heart in Princeton University, MS Taylor 17,” in which Dr. Johanna Pollick explores a small English illuminated devotional book, dating from around 1500, that portrays Christ’s wounds as wells. For help in interpreting these images, she turns to medieval literary traditions as well as to the Carthusian Miscellany.
Wounded Heart of Christ as the Well of Lyfe, England, ca. 1500. Princeton University Library, MS Taylor 17, fol. 10v.
Dr. Grace Hamman writes about MS Taylor 17’s extraordinary “well of lyfe” page in Jesus through Medieval Eyes (and for InterVarsity’s The Well), which is what brought me to this essay. The hand-colored image shows flowers—labeled “pyte” (pity), “loue” (love), and “charyte” (charity)—springing forth from the wounded heart of Jesus. The verse prayer at the top reads, “Well of lyfe that ever shall laste / My herte in thee make it stedfast.”
The same theme shows up in another late fifteenth-century English lyric in MS Arundel 286 at the British Library, which appears in modern compilations under the title “The Wounds, as Wells of Life” or “The Wells of Jesus’ Wounds”:
Ihesus woundes so wide Ben welles of lif to the goode, Namely the stronde of his syde That ran ful breme on the rode. Yif thee list to drinke To fle fro the fendes of helle, Bowe thu doun to the brinke And mekely taste of the welle.
Jesus’s wounds so wide Are wells of life to the good, Namely the stream from his side That ran fiercely on the rood. If thou list to drink, To flee from the fiends of hell, Bow thou down to the brink And meekly taste of the well.
Trans. Victoria Emily Jones
And in a late fifteenth-century gold ring, also from England, engraved with a Man of Sorrows image and hieroglyphs of Christ’s five wounds, labeled “The well of pitty, the well of merci, the well of confort, the well of gracy, the well of everlastingh lyffe”:
SONG: “Deep Were His Wounds” by William Johnson, 1953: This midcentury hymn is composed of three simple stanzas: The first half of each meditates on Jesus’s cruel death on the cross, whereas each second half (“But . . .”) celebrates the healing, freedom, and eternal life that death wrought.
>> Music by Leland B. Sateren, 1958: I like this tune, called MARLEE, but it’s difficult to sing congregationally. Here’s a soloist, Sarah Gulseth, singing it for her church’s 2011 Good Friday service, accompanied on organ by Luther Gulseth:
>> Music by Vito Aiuto, 2008: I was first introduced to “Deep Were His Wounds” through the Welcome Wagon’s debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, “a ramshackle singalong enterprise of a Presbyterian pastor (the Rev. Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) wrestling out the influences of folk music, religion, popular culture, and church tradition.” Mood-wise, Aiuto’s tune wouldn’t work as well for Good Friday—even given the paradox of that day, it’s too bright, in my opinion, for that somber observance. But it’s great for throughout the year, especially for churches that favor a contemporary/folksy style of music.
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CANTATA CYCLE:“Membra Jesu Nostri” (The Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus) by Dieterich Buxtehude: Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707) was a Danish German organist and composer of the mid-Baroque period. For Good Friday 1680, he composed a cycle of seven concerto-aria cantatas. The texts of the aria sections are taken from the medieval Latin hymn “Salve mundi salutare” (Hail, the World’s Salvation) by the Cistercian abbot Arnulf of Leuven (ca. 1200–1250), whereas the concerto section texts are Old Testament quotations. The following video is a 2004 performance from Payerne, Switzerland; see the YouTube video description for further credits. The video includes English subtitles, but you can also read the lyrics (with translation) here.
The cycle begins by paying homage to Christ’s wounded feet (“Ad Pedes” = “To the Feet”), and then progresses upward to his knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and finally, face/head. Traditionally, Christ’s wounds are enumerated as five: a hole in each foot, a hole in each hand, and a hole through his side/heart (from the centurion’s spear). But Arnulf meditates on seven distinct body parts of Christ’s that were injured on Good Friday.
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ARTWORKS:
>> The Five Wounds of Christ by Fernand Léger | Commentary by Albert Hengelaar: This visual meditation is about the architecture and interior decoration of the Sacré-Coeur in Audincourt, France, a product of the Art Sacré movement, a Catholic art renaissance spearheaded by the French Dominican Order from 1919 to the 1950s. The centerpiece of the church, sited above the high altar, is a stained glass window depicting the five wounds of Christ shining like suns—one of seventeen windows the artist Fernand Léger designed to encircle the space in a strip.
Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955), The Five Wounds of Christ, 1950–52. Stained glass window, Église du Sacré-Cœur (Church of the Sacred Heart), Audincourt, France.
>> The Great Wound, aka Go On, Wounded Healer by Jack Baumgartner | Commentary by Sam Kee: In this Substack post, Sam Kee unpacks a drawing by his friend Jack Baumgartner [previously], which shows that “there is life in His [Christ’s] wounds, and He pours His life into our wounds.” The drawing started with the roman numeral V, which stands for the five wounds of Christ. The circumference is one large wound that encompasses five smaller wounds, eye-like, each one weeping blood. Other symbols that Kee analyzes in the drawing are wheat, grapes, fig leaves, seashell, fire, heart, and womb. “Go on” is a refrain that Baumgartner uses often in his work, a mantra for persevering in the faith, for continuing on the path.
Jack Baumgartner (American, 1976–), The Great Wound, 2024. Drawing from the series The Diary of a Tree Standing on Its Head.
Kee concludes with an original ekphrastic poem.
You can purchase an archival reproduction of The Great Wound from Baumgartner’s online shop. I encourage you to explore his website as well. I admire how his work is somehow both mystical and earthy, rooted.
In honor of Women’s History Month, here are a few creative works by and/or (in the case of Kinloch’s “Some Women” poems) about women.
ARTICLE: “A New Documentary Traces How a Faith Ringgold Mural at Rikers Island Helped Women Break Free,”Colossal: Directed by Catherine Gund, the documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here (2025) tells the story of Faith Ringgold’s For the Women’s House (1971), a mural commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts for the Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island. When Ringgold asked the incarcerated women what they wanted her to paint, they said, “I want to see a road leading out of here.”
Faith Ringgold (American, 1930–2024), For the Women’s House, 1971. Oil on canvas, 96 × 96 in. Commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts for the Correctional Institution for Women on Rikers Island; on loan to Brooklyn Museum.
Organized into eight triangular sections, the painting portrays women of various races (Black, white, Latina, Asian) in professional roles “that have not traditionally been theirs,” Ringgold says: doctor, bus driver, US president, basketball player, police officer, construction worker, drummer, priest. At the bottom, a white mother reads to her multiracial daughter words by Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and in another scene, a bride is given away by her mother.
When Rikers Island transitioned to housing men in 1988, the women were moved to the Rose M. Singer Center, and the prison staff painted over Ringgold’s mural. Gund’s documentary chronicles the fight—by Ringgold and other artists, activists, politicians, and correctional officers—to have the mural restored, relocated, and preserved, but more deeply, the film is a “parable for a world without mass incarceration.”
Paint Me a Road Out of Here is not currently available on VOD, but here’s a list of public screenings: https://paintmearoadfilm.com/watch.
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LECTURE: “Re-Valuing Women Hymn Writers” by Dr. Lyn Loewi, St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, Washington, DC, June 11, 2023: “Women have always been making sacred music, but they are underrepresented in our hymnals. Their contribution lies in the stories they tell from the margins, away from the narratives of dominant power. In this talk, Lyn Loewi will look at the poetry women have brought to our understanding of the Sacred. From the 9th-century Greek Orthodox nun Kassia to newly written hymns, women have expanded our language for God, remembered the stories of biblical women, and spoken for other discounted voices in society.”
Loewi, who has a doctorate in musical arts, has been an organist and church choir director for over forty years. She is currently the director of music ministries at Christ Church Capitol Hill, as well as the president of the Women’s Sacred Music Project. In this talk she discusses:
The Hymn of Kassiani
“The first one ever, oh, ever to know” by Linda Wilberger Egan
“Healing River of the Spirit” by Ruth Duck (text)
“Down by the Riverside” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (arrangement)
“Balulalow” by Elizabeth Poston (music)
“Beyond the hopes and dreams of all creation” by Fr. Robert Easton (text) and Ghislaine Reece-Trapp (music)
The last few minutes of the recording, starting at 38:33, comprise audience Q&A; don’t miss the last question (41:29), where a woman expresses exasperation with all the “he/him” pronouns used for God in hymns—Loewi’s response is helpful.
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HYMNS:
When I was responsible for choosing songs for my church’s worship services, I made sure that every week I was on, at least one of the five songs we sang was written by a woman. Here are just three female-authored hymns that were part of my rotation—one (likely) from the tenth century, one from the eighteenth century, and one from the twenty-first century.
>> “Bí Thusa Mo Shúile” (Be Thou My Vision), Anon., trans. Mary Elizabeth Byrne, vers. Eleanor Hull: I can’t believe I’ve never featured this hymn on the blog before; it’s one of my all-time favorites. Its precise origins are not known. Most scholars date the original Early Middle Irish text, a lorica (prayer recited for protection), to the late tenth or eleventh century. It was translated into English in 1905 by Mary Elizabeth Byrne and then versified in 1912 by Eleanor Hull—meaning she adapted Byrne’s translation to fit a meter so that the words could be more easily sung. The music is a traditional Irish folk tune.
In this video, the hymn is sung in modern Irish by Madelyn Monaghan, a New York City–based soprano specializing in Irish traditional (Sean-nós) singing. It was for her friend’s wedding Mass. And wow, is her voice gorgeous!
>> “Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul” by Anne Steele (text) and Kevin Twit (music): Anne Steele was a Baptist hymn writer, poet, and essayist from Georgian England who published under the pen name Theodosia. Coming from a well-off family, she was educated and chose to remain single (she rejected several marriage proposals) so that she could focus on her writing, which she considered a calling. Rev. Kevin Twit, a Reformed University Fellowship pastor in Nashville and the founder of Indelible Grace, says Steele was the first significant female Christian hymn writer and the first, of either sex, to write lament hymns; over half her oeuvre, he says, deals with suffering and doubt.
Twit has set several of Steele’s hymns to music, most famously “Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul,” which Steele wrote in 1760. The solo performance above is from the January 24, 2021, worship service at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. The names of the singer and accompanist are not given. You can also listen to the song on Indelible Grace’s 2008 album.
>> “We Will Feast in the House of Zion” by Sandra McCracken and Joshua Moore:Sandra McCracken is one of today’s leading Christian singer-songwriters, and this hymn, which she wrote with Josh Moore, is the most popular of her congregational songs. From her 2015 album Psalms, it paints a vision of the eschaton, of the new heavens and the new earth, marked by restoration, shalom, and celebration. One thing I noticed as a church music leader is how many hymns and other worship songs use first-person singular pronouns (I/me/my) and emphasize one’s personal relationship with God; those are fine and even necessary, as the book of Psalms models, but I always made sure, when making a song list, to balance them with songs that use first-personal plural (us/we/our) and that convey a more communal picture of the Christian life and of the gospel, which is at least but also much more than what Jesus did for me. This is perhaps my favorite hymn about heaven, a place of safety and rest, yes, but also where all of creation is redeemed, made new; where everyone and everything flourishes in harmony under the benevolent reign of Christ.
“We Will Feast” works well during Communion (a ritual that anticipates the marriage supper of the Lamb) or as a closer, as it sends worshippers out with a benediction, a good word—a promise of the restorative beauty to come.
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VIDEO: “Poetry Unbound: A Conversation with David Kinloch and Pádraig Ó Tuama,” Washington National Cathedral, April 26, 2021: The On Being Project in partnership with Washington National Cathedral presents Pádraig Ó Tuama in conversation with the Scottish poet David Kinloch, part of a series of interviews with contemporary poets whose work demonstrates an artistic and literary engagement with biblical narratives and characters. They primarily discuss Kinloch’s extensive “Some Women” sequence of poems from his collection In Search of Dustie-Fute (Carcanet, 2017), voiced by women of the Bible (or, in the case of the first, Jewish folklore): Lilith, Cain’s wife, Adah and Zillah, Sarah, Lot’s wife, Rebekah, Zipporah, Deborah, Rahab, the Levite’s concubine, Ruth, Bathsheba, the daughters of Job, King David’s concubines, Hannah, Martha, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the Jewish women followers of Jesus responding to the apostle Paul’s teachings.
(The conversation starts at 7:55.)
Kinloch reads three poems from “Some Women”: “First Letter of the Hebrew Women to St Paul” (15:36), “Ruth” (23:49), and “Cain’s Wife” (29:58). He also reads two additional poems from the same volume, from the sequence “Joseph’s Dreams”: “St Joseph’s Dream” (40:44) and “Another Dream” (1:08:53).
This conversation impelled to check out In Search of Dustie-Fute from the library. I like the “Some Women” sequence overall—Kinloch’s creative engagement with the stories of these women, some very little known (e.g., I had to look up “Adah” and “Zillah”!) or little thought about (like the unnamed victims of sexual abuse)—though I will warn you that it contains some profanity and crude sexual language. In the Q&A that starts at 49:09, one of the questions is about the role of shock and humor in his poetry. (Kinloch says if his poems offend, they fail.) Other questions are about the biblical literacy that he does or does not presuppose, his editing process, a character from the Bible that he wants to write about but hasn’t yet, and why he, a man, feels justified in writing from the perspective of women.
Kinloch is an agnostic, so his relationship with biblical texts is different from that of one who is devout. But the Bible is not the exclusive domain of believers; Kinloch can just as well help us inhabit these stories and can derive questions or insights from them. I really appreciated hearing from him. Here’s what he had to say on the vernacular of everyday human experience:
It seems to me that there’s such distance—in terms of time, in terms of culture—between us in the twenty-first century and the people of those [ancient Near Eastern] communities. You need to find common ground so that some kind of dialogue can open up, so that you can shrink that distance. And therefore, the emphasis in all of these poems, really, is on the humanity of the people. I’m not writing sermons, I’m not writing homilies; I’m writing little dramatic monologues, mostly, and trying to make these people as believable, as real, as possible in the present moment of reading about them. My hope, I suppose, is that if people have enjoyed the poems, then maybe they might go back to those stories in the Bible. And it’s at that point that there will be an encounter with the divine, with the extraordinary. I don’t really feel that I have access to those moments of extraordinariness. All the extraordinariness is in the Bible, and I can only offer an avenue of approach to that.
It joined us together, the well; the well led me into you. No one between us but light deep in the well, the pupil of the eye set in an orbit of stones.
Within your eyes, I, drawn by the well, am enclosed.
Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz, fromCollected Poemsby Karol Wojtyla (Random House, 1982)
This contemplative poem was originally published in Polish in Kraków’s leading Catholic periodical, Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly), on May 7, 1950, when Karol Wojtyla was a twenty-nine-year-old parish priest. It’s the sixth in a sequence of eight poems collectively titled “Song of the Brightness of Water” (Pieśń o blasku wody), all reflecting on Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4.
Karol Wojtyla (1920–2005) was a theologian, philosopher, poet, and priest best known for serving as head of the Catholic Church as Pope John Paul II from 1978 until his death. He traveled more than any other pope (visiting 129 countries), helped end Communism in Eastern Europe, fostered interfaith dialogue, and promoted human rights. He was canonized on April 27, 2014. Born, raised, and educated in Poland, in 1938–39 Karol studied Polish philology (literature and language) at Jagiellonian University, but his academic pursuits were interrupted by the Nazi occupation. He avoided conscription in the German military by working as a manual laborer in a quarry—which he did while secretly taking seminary courses in Kraków from 1942 to 1946 (Catholicism was suppressed at the time) and participating in the underground theater scene as both an actor and a playwright. After graduating, he was ordained to the priesthood. Throughout the first half of his adult life—as a student, young parish priest, bishop, archbishop, and cardinal—Karol wrote and published poetry anonymously and then pseudonymously under the names Andrzej Jawień and Stanisław Andrzej Gruda. After he became pope, many of these poems were compiled into a collection, translated into English with Vatican approval, and released in book form under his given name. Karol continued writing poetry during his pontificate, but at a much slower pace. His most famous writings are in prose and include the landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) on human dignity, the international bestseller Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and a series of 129 addresses titled The Theology of the Body.
Jerzy Peterkiewicz (1916–2007) was a Polish poet, novelist, and translator. In 1940 he fled his home country, arriving in England as a war refugee with no knowledge of the language. He went on to become a literature professor at London University, and in 1960, with coeditor and cotranslator Burns Singer, he published the influential anthology Five Centuries of Polish Poetry, 1450–1950. He was later chosen by a papal commission to translate the poetry of Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla).
Julia Fernandez-Pol (Argentine, 1984–), Glacial Rain, 2008. Oil on canvas. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Colorado Springs. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Make me river, cold with mountain, green with quiver, silver in
the run and churn of winter leaving, valley waking, sheet moss
breathing. Make me flash of mica, drift of foam. O Lord of flux,
make these dry bones flow, teach me to spill, pool, glide, fall, tutor me
to long for depth, seek downward paths, indwell the low. Oh teach me
liturgy of keel, swirl, flume, the breaking into mist, the pull, the press,
the song. Oh form me into blood of bedrock, quest of glacier, dream
of sea, release me, set me free to course, surge, pour, sweep, issue, eddy,
shower, plummet, roll. O Lord of flood, O Lord of spray, unstill my soul.
Abigail Carroll is a poet whose work, as Walter Brueggemann called it, is “an unflinching witness to the reality and goodness of God.” She has authored the collections Cup My Days Like Water (Cascade, 2023), Habitation of Wonder (Cascade, 2018), and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim (Eerdmans, 2017), and her poems have also been published in anthologies and periodicals. She makes her home in Vermont, where she serves as associate pastor at Church at the Well. In addition to writing, she enjoys walking, photographing nature, and playing piano.
February is Black History Month, and while I endeavor to showcase Black art year-round, today’s post gives it dedicated attention.
VIDEO: “Kerry James Marshall, Now and Forever; Elizabeth Alexander, ‘American Song,’ Washington National Cathedral,” Smarthistory, January 22, 2024: Art historian Beth Harris and Kevin Eckstrom, former chief public affairs officer of Washington National Cathedral, explore the latest artwork to be permanently installed in the US capital’s “house of prayer for all people”: two Now and Forever stained glass windows by Kerry James Marshall, depicting a march for racial justice. Unveiled on September 23, 2023, these replace windows that memorialized Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1953. (For my international readers: The Confederacy was a group of eleven Southern US states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to preserve the institution of race-based chattel slavery on which their plantation economies relied; its government was dissolved in 1865 following the end of the Civil War, but its legacy continued.)
In 2015, when a white supremacist, who touted the Confederate flag as symbolic of his ideology, murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington National Cathedral’s dean at the time, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, called for the removal of the Lee-Jackson windows, which initiated a two-year discernment process involving ample community discussions. The cathedral finally took down the windows in 2017 following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed yet another life. The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, then the dean, said the windows “were a barrier to our mission, and an impediment to worship in this place.” Their removal and the installation of the Now and Forever windows in their place were funded by private foundations.
Kerry James Marshall (American, 1955–), Now and Forever, 2023. Fabricated by Andrew Goldkuhle. Stained glass windows, south outer aisle, bay 7, Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photo: Steven Zucker.
“American Song” by Elizabeth Alexander, commissioned by Washington National Cathedral and inscribed below Kerry James Marshall’s Now and Forever windows in bay 7. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
In addition to commissioning Marshall to design new windows, the cathedral commissioned the Pulitzer-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and read “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, to write a poem for this occasion. Titled “American Song,” it is inscribed on two limestone tablets beneath Marshall’s windows. The Windows Replacement Committee gave both artists this assignment:
We seek to tell a story of resilience, endurance, and courage that gives meaning and expression to the long and arduous plight of the African American, from slavery to freedom, from alienation to the hope of reconciliation, through physical and spiritual regeneration, as we move from the past to present day. The artist will capture both darkness and light, both the pain of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow, as well as the quiet and exemplary dignity of the African American struggle for justice and equality and the indelible and progressive impact it has had on American society. Each artist should respond in his or her own creative way to these ideals and aspirations, framing both the earthly and the divine, within the sacred space of the Washington National Cathedral.
When I was there last year, I asked the guide why the signs the figures hold don’t bear any of the more familiar slogans of our historical moment, such as “Black Lives Matter.” She said the artist deliberately did not want to tether the protest to a particular time period, in order to emphasize that the struggle for racial equality is ongoing. “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” “No,” “Not”—these are expressions of demand and defiance that could apply to a number of justice-related issues and that encompass people of all races.
DANCE: “Still I Rise,” choreographed by Sean Cheesman: I really miss the TV show So You Think You Can Dance, which had aspiring dancers train across genres—contemporary, hip-hop, ballroom, jazz, etc.—with renowned choreographers, performing to compete for the title of “America’s favorite dancer.” It was entertaining, impressive (the athleticism!), and often moving. Here’s a contemporary routine choreographed by Sean Cheesman to spoken word artist Alexis Henry’s reading of a classic poem by Maya Angelou about Black strength and defiance. It’s danced by Koine “Koko” Iwasaki, Kiki Nyemchek, Taylor Sieve, and Mark Villaver. It’s from season 14, episode 12, which aired September 4, 2017.
(Another memorable Cheesman-choreographed dance from season 14 is an African jazz duet to Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II,” which unfortunately, I cannot find online.)
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ARTICLE: “Stephen Towns’ Quilted Works Emphasize Black Joy as Resistance in ‘Safer Waters’” by Kate Mothes: Through June 14, the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas is hosting the exhibition Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury, featuring eleven quilts and six paintings by the Baltimore-based artist Stephen Towns [previously]. Black history has always been an important aspect of Towns’s work, and in this series he was inspired by historic photographs (by Bruce Mozert) of Paradise Park, a segregated attraction in Silver Springs, Florida, that operated from 1949 to 1969 and that was popular among Black vacationers, providing a space for leisure and togetherness away from Jim Crow.
Stephen Towns (American, 1980–), All We Knew Was Joy, 2025. Natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, cubic zirconia, glass beads, and shell, 55 × 65 1/2 in.
Towns began his Paradise Park series in 2022 after reading Remembering Paradise Park by Cynthia Wilson-Graham and Lu Vickers, and this show is a continuation of it, for which he made seven new quilts (pictured in Mothes’s article). His art is displayed alongside some of Mozert’s photographs and related objects from Florida archives and collectors. See an exhibition walk-through on the artist’s Instagram page; see also photos from the opening on January 16–17.
Gospel music is one of the many gifts the Black church has given the world. Here are two songs from that distinctive choral tradition.
>> “Perfect Praise (How Excellent)” by Brenda Joyce Moore, performed by the Sunday Service Choir: Written in 1989 based on Psalm 8, this song gained recognition through its performance on the 1990 album This Is the Day by Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago, featuring Lecresia Campbell. It has since become a gospel choir standard, though often with the lead vocals eliminated (and that part taken by the full choir). It’s performed in this video by Sunday Service at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris on March 1, 2020.
>> “He’s a Wonder” by Jamel Garner, performed by the Chicago Mass Choir, feat. Cornelius Owens: This song about Jesus’s miracles is from the Chicago Mass Choir’s 2024 album Greater Is Coming.
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PODCAST EPISODES:
>> “Artist Archetypes with Jakari Sherman,”Be. Make. Do., January 21, 2025: I really enjoyed this conversation with Jakari Sherman on the soul|makers podcast hosted by Rev. Lisa Cole Smith, where he describes his journey as an artist and a believer. Sherman is a choreographer within the tradition of stepping, a percussive dance practice in which dancers use primarily their hands and feet to create music. Stepping comes from the African American Greek letter organizations and has roots, Sherman explains, in the antebellum South, where enslaved people had their drums taken away and thus had to find ways to express the rhythms they felt using just the floor and their own bodies. (Tap evolved largely for the same reason.)
Sherman is the creative director of [Jk]creativ, a multidisciplinary company developing purpose-driven and truth-seeking cultural works. From 2007 to 2014 he served as the artistic director of Step Afrika! and has continued to develop and direct works for them, such as Drumfolk and The Migration (which I saw in 2024 and was excellent). To establish a foundation for his scholarly research on the history of stepping, he completed a master of arts program in ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in 2015. Below is a trailer for one of Sherman’s latest works, Our Road Home, an interactive rhythmic production that meditates “on what is means to find freedom—and to live it fully in body, soul, and spirit”; it premiered last June as part of a year-long collaboration with the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.
>> “Cole Arthur Riley – Black Liturgies,”Nomad, February 9, 2024: Tim Nash interviews Cole Arthur Riley, the best-selling author of Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human(which grew out of her popular Instagram account @blackliturgies) and This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. She is a wise, feeling, richly spiritual and embodied writer and speaker whose work I’ve appreciated. In this conversation she discusses her hang-ups with the Book of Common Prayer; battling chronic illness; balancing the active and contemplative lives; the revival of lament; self-sacrifice versus self-care; her experience of white people engaging with her work (“I like to think that there’s something mysterious that’s healed in us when we encounter each other’s interior worlds; when we hear words written by a Black woman toward God, that that could somehow move someone in some way, and move us closer to each other”); and what hope means to her and where she sees signs of it.
Even though I, as a white person, am not the intended audience for the book Black Liturgies, in reading it, I found it meaningful to listen to the cries of Riley’s heart. While many of the prayers are particular to the experience of being Black, still many others are general enough that they could be prayed by anyone. Part 1, organized thematically, consists of chapters such as “Dignity,” “Wonder,” “Doubt,” “Lament,” “Rage,” and “Rest,” whereas part 2 contains prayers for dawn, day, and dusk as well as for the liturgical year, secular holidays, and life occasions. I like the names for God with which she opens each prayer—e.g., “God of the shadows,” “God who expands,” “Divine Labyrinth,” “God aware,” “God of locked doors,” “God who reclaims,” “God our home,” “God of delight,” “God of the art that will never be seen,” “God who whispers”; it has prompted me to consider the names and descriptions I use for God and how they influence how I pray.
To give you a flavor of Black Liturgies, here are two prayers from the book (and note that prayers are only one component; also included are letters, quotes, questions for contemplation, confessions and assurances of pardon, and benedictions):
For Marveling at Your Own Face
God of the flesh, When we consider what is worthy of our wonder, it is easy to forget our own faces, our bodies. The world is relentless in indoctrinating us into self-hatred—into anti-Blackness, into transphobia, into misogyny in all forms. We are slowly and steadily brainwashed to despise our own faces from the time we’re tall enough to stare up at ourselves in the mirror. How can we resist this? Let the tyranny of the mirror be no more. May it instead become a portal—to delight, to pleasure, and to love. These noses, these hips, the way our hair rises and falls. The memories etched into our hands and faces. Remind us of the miracle of flesh that grows back, of blood that pulses warm beneath the skin that holds us. Of bodies, these holy beautiful bodies, that are working a thousand unseen miracles just so that we can read these lines, breathe this air, cry or not cry. As we peer into the face before us, remind us that we are something to behold. We believe; forgive our unbelief. Ase.
For Those Who Doomscroll
Still God, We confess that we are addicted to pessimism. Although we rarely name it as such, so much of our attention is devoted to negativity. Show us how we use technology to soothe and stir the aches in us. Keep us from turning control over to our anxiety, that it would no longer feed itself with news of tragedy and impending disaster. It is easy to become lost, buried in the quicksand of digital catastrophe. Draw our attention upward. Guide us to look away habitually; and not just away, but up at the sky, the grass, the table. Guide us inward as well. Acquaint us with goodness again. In the world, and in ourselves. Let us follow the children, freed from the grip of seriousness. Renew our playfulness. Lead us into wise rhythms of engagement, retreating to rest and breathe. Remind us that there is much the world needs, including our attention to atrocity—but if we watch the world burn for long enough, the fire will become our only reality. Amen.
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), Simeon in the Temple, 1669. Oil on canvas, 98.5 × 79.5 cm. Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Sweden. Photo: Erik Cornelius.
after Simeon in the Temple, Rembrandt, 1669
Fingers stretch as if supplicating hands are interrupted— the answer placed in his waiting arms.
Light glistens on his temple— the mind consoled by consolation’s burden.
Death takes the prophet; takes the artist before his painting is complete; takes the one already bearing sin’s stripes.
CONFERENCE: The Breath and the Clay: Exploring the Intersections of Art, Faith, and Culture, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 20–22, 2026: “Before the first word is spoken, before the brush touches the canvas or the note strikes the air, there is silence. Creation begins with a clearing, making space for new worlds to exist. An empty chair waits in welcome, an empty forest beckons us to come aside. Even absence itself becomes an opening for presence.
“At The Breath & The Clay 2026, we are exploring what it means to make space—for rest, for renewal, for art, for one another, and for the Presence that meets us in the emptiness. Together, we will practice making room: for the unfinished, and the unfurnished, for the overlooked, for voices not our own. In this space, we will make art—our response to the silence that precedes creation, our offering to the mystery and miracle that ever calls us onward.”
This annual gathering features presenters from across the disciplines of poetry, music, visual art, theater, film, dance, creativity coaching, and real estate development. General admission is $299.
>> “How Long (A Christian Lament)” by IAMSON: This week the Richmond, Virginia–based singer-songwriter IAMSON (the artist name of Orlando Palmer) wrote his pain into a song and shared it on social media. “I challenge all Christian artists to write about what’s really going on,” he says, likely referring to the two murders committed this month by US federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and, more broadly, the agencies’ hypermilitarized tactics, indiscriminate raids, illegal detainments, and terrorizing of communities in deference to President Trump’s mass deportation initiative.
>> “Psalm 10” by Poor Bishop Hooper: Poor Bishop Hooper (Leah and Jesse Roberts) have set all 150 psalms of the Bible to music. Psalm 10 is one I had not ever heard a musical interpretation of. Belonging to the genre of lament, it opens:
Why, O LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor— let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.
>> “Micah 6:8” by Monroe Crossing:Monroe Crossing [previously] is a Minnesota bluegrass band whose members are Lisa Fuglie (fiddle), David Robinson (banjo), Derek Johnson (guitar), Matt Thompson (mandolin), and Mark Anderson (bass). This is a song Fuglie and Anderson wrote in 2011 inspired by Micah 6:8, one of this coming Sunday’s lectionary readings: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” Many Christians hold on to this as a “life verse,” a summation of God’s values that serves as a guiding principle.
FREE DIGITAL POETRY BOOKLET: Inkwell Poetry for the New Year (2026): Last week Inkwell (formerly Ekstasis), a publication of Christianity Today, released a collection of twenty poems curated by guest editor J. C. Scharl, and it’s excellent! “A storytelling community seeking transcendence,” Inkwell is in a period of refining their identity, and this offering is a sort of stopgap until they reintroduce poetry features into their editorial flow. (Right now they’re focusing on creative nonfiction.)
“Knocking on the Door,” woodcut from Von der ynnigen selen wy sy gott casteyet vnnd im beheglich mach, aka Christus und die minnende Seele (Christ and the Loving Soul), published in Erfurt, Germany, ca. 1500. Museum Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany, OS 231, fol. 5v. Digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
“Sonnet XVIII” by Lope de Vega
¿Qué tengo yo que mi amistad procuras? ¿Qué interés se te sigue, Jesús mío, que a mi puerta cubierto de rocío pasas las noches del invierno escuras?
¡Oh, cuánto fueron mis entrañas duras pues no te abrí! ¡Qué extraño desvarío si de mi ingratitud el hielo frío secó las llagas de tus plantas puras!
¡Cuántas veces el ángel me decía: «¡Alma, asómate agora a la ventana, verás con cuánto amor llamar porfía!» ¡Y cuántas, hermosura soberana, «Mañana le abriremos» – respondía, para lo mismo responder mañana!
From Rimas sacras (Sacred Rhymes) by Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1614). Public domain.
Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was as astoundingly prolific Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist who was a key figure in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature. His 1,800-some plays encompass the categories of religious, mythological, historical, pastoral, chivalric, and comedies of manners. A known philanderer, Lope had multiple love affairs throughout his life; besides the four children he had from his two wives, he also had at least ten more by his mistresses. The death of his son in 1612, and then of his lover the following year, threw him into an existential crisis, and he turned toward religion, even joining the Catholic priesthood in 1614—but that path didn’t lead to the personal reform he had thought he wanted, as he continued his womanizing. He died of scarlet fever at age seventy-two.
Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Lord, what am I, that with unceasing care Thou didst seek after me, that thou didst wait, Wet with unhealthy dews, before my gate, And pass the gloomy nights of winter there?
Oh, strange delusion, that I did not greet Thy blest approach! and oh, to heaven how lost, If my ingratitude’s unkindly frost Has chilled the bleeding wounds upon thy feet!
How oft my guardian angel gently cried, “Soul, from thy casement look, and thou shalt see How he persists to knock and wait for thee!” And oh, how often to that voice of sorrow, “Tomorrow we will open,” I replied, And when the morrow came I answered still, “Tomorrow.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet, educator, and linguist, best known for “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha.” From 1829 to 1854, he was a professor of modern languages, first at Bowdoin College, his alma mater, and then at Harvard University. Though rooted in New England, he traveled extensively in Europe and was proficient in—besides his native English—Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Polish, as well as Latin and Greek. He frequently translated poetry from those languages into English, his most influential translation being of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought that work to a wider English-speaking audience.
Translated by Geoffrey Hill
Based on the prose translation by J. M. Cohen in The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, 3rd ed. (Penguin, 1988)
What is there in my heart that you should sue so fiercely for its love? What kind of care brings you as though a stranger to my door through the long night and in the icy dew
seeking the heart that will not harbour you, that keeps itself religiously secure? At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.
So many nights the angel of my house has fed such urgent comfort through a dream, whispered ‘your lord is coming, he is close’ that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse: ‘tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.’
Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was an English poet and literary critic who is recognized as a principal contributor to those fields in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was a Christian. From 1988 to 2006, he lived in the United States, where he taught literature and religion at Boston University, but throughout his career he also had professorships at Oxford, Leeds, and Cambridge. “Hill’s poetry is known for its barbed humor, personal intensity, and deep interests in culture, history, and religion,” Poets.org states, and for being dense and intellectually rigorous.
The eighteenth sonnet from Lope de Vega’s Rimas sacras—reproduced above in its original Spanish and in two English translations—portrays Jesus as a lover, knocking tenaciously to be let into his beloved’s heart. He stands outside at night in the cold, a coldness matched by the beloved’s indifference, for she says, “I’ll open tomorrow,” but then keeps putting off that promise to the next day and the next . . .
“The poet marvels at the persistence of divine love in the face of human ingratitude,” writes Colin Thompson in his journal article “‘The Resonances of Words’: Lope de Vega and Geoffrey Hill.” Lope mines the paradox of fiery passion and icy rejection, Thompson says, “pressing . . . the traditional language of Petrarchan and courtly love into the service of spiritual love.”
Lope derived the conceit of “¿Qué tengo yo?” from two biblical passages: one in the Old Testament and one in the New. Part of an ancient Hebrew erotic love poem, the first is Song of Solomon 5:2–6, in which a woman narrates how, lying in bed one night, she hears her lover’s call outside, but she waits too long to answer, for when she rises to open the door, he has gone:
I was sleeping, but my heart was awake. The sound of my beloved knocking! “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”
I had put off my garment; how could I put it on again? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them? My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him.
I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt. I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned away and was gone. My soul failed me when he spoke. I sought him but did not find him; I called him, but he gave no answer.
Chapter 3, verse 20 of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, implicitly references this passage. Christ exclaims to the church in Laodicea, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” The extrapolation of the Song of Solomon romance to the relationship between Christ and the church, allegorized as his bride, would become common in early Christian biblical interpretation.
In his poem, Lope was also likely drawing on Augustine, a fourth- and fifth-century church father he is known to have read. In a famous passage from book 8 of his Confessions, Augustine describes how he initially responded to Christ’s wooing with indecisiveness:
I had no answer to make to you when you called me: Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. And, while you showed me, wherever I looked, that what you said was true, I, convinced by the truth, could still find nothing to say except lazy words spoken half asleep: “A minute,” “just a minute,” “just a little time longer.” But there was no limit to the minutes, and the little time longer went a long way. (trans. Rex Warner)
Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was a slow one because of his slothful will. Many modern readers find that they relate to him in this—procrastinating making a faith decision because of force of habit and resistance to change. We worry what a commitment to Christ would demand of us, and it’s easier to just continue living for ourselves. So we settle for the status quo. Geoffrey Hill, in his translation of Lope, describes “the heart . . . / that keeps itself religiously secure,” punning on “religiously,” which in this case means “fervently, zealously”: the heart that, unwilling to be vulnerable, not daring to love and be loved, keeps itself closed to Christ.
Besides these biblical and patristic influences on Lope’s poem, Rafael Lapesa, in his 1977 book Poetas y prosistas de ayer y de hoy (Poets and Prose Writers of Yesterday and Today), identifies another: De los nombres de Cristo (The Names of Christ) by the Spanish Augustinian friar Luis de León, a masterpiece of Renaissance philosophical and theological thought first published in 1583. The “Pastor” (Shepherd) section in book 1 reads in part:
Madruga, digo antes que amanezca se levanta; o, por decir verdad, no duerme ni reposa, sino, asido siempre al aldaba de nuestro corazón, de contino y a todas horas le hiere y le dice, como en los Cantares se escribe: Abreme, hermana mia, Amiga mia, Esposa mia, abreme; que la cabeza traigo llena de rocio, y las guedejas de mis cabellos llenas de gotas de la noche.
He [Christ] rises early, I say; before dawn he rises. Or, to tell the truth, he neither sleeps nor rests but, always clinging to the knocker of our heart, continually and at all hours strikes it and says to it, as it is written in the Song of Songs: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my bride, open to me; for my head is covered with dew, and the locks of my hair are full of drops of the night.” (my translation)
Lope eulogized Luis in his seven-thousand-line Laurel de Apolo (1630) and clearly admired him.
The “Christ as lover” trope appears copiously in Christian literature, and Lope de Vega is but one poet who developed it, engaging it from a personal, confessional angle. Written right after his return to Christianity—after he finally opened the door to Christ—his “Sonnet XVIII” looks back on the many years he spent ignoring Christ’s entreaties so that he could pursue various lusts, which he would continue to struggle with for the rest of his life. He expresses wonder that Christ would love someone like him, and be so steadfast in his knocking. Unlike the knocking lover in the Song of Solomon, Christ stood before Lope’s door until Lope answered at last, “Come in.”
Joseph Stella (American, 1877–1946), Nativity, 1919–20. Oil pastel and oil on paper, 37 × 19 5/16 in. (94 × 49.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Julian’s room. Christmas Day; early morn.
JULIAN. The light comes feebly, slowly, to the world On this one day that blesses all the year, Just as it comes on any other day: A feeble child He came, yet not the less Brought godlike childhood to the aged earth, Where nothing now is common anymore. All things hitherto proclaimed God: The wide-spread air; the luminous mist that hid The far horizon of the fading sea; The low persistent music evermore Flung down upon the sands, and at the base Of the great rocks that hold it as a cup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But men heard not, they knew not God in these[.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But when He came in poverty, and low, A real man to half-unreal men, A man whose human thoughts were all divine, The head and upturned face of humankind— Then God shone forth from all the lowly earth, And men began to read their Maker there. Now the Divine descends, pervading all. Earth is no more a banishment from heaven, But a lone field among the distant hills, Well ploughed and sown, whence corn is gathered home. Now, now we feel the holy mystery That permeates all being: all is God’s; And my poor life is terribly sublime. Where’er I look, I am alone in God, As this round world is wrapt in folding space; Behind, before, begin and end in Him: So all beginnings and all ends are hid; And He is hid in me, and I in Him. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O centre of all forms! O concord’s home! O world alive in one condensèd world! O face of Him, in whose heart lay concealed The fountain thought of all this kingdom of heaven! Lord, Thou art infinite, and I am Thine! I sought my God; I pressed importunate; I spoke to Him, I cried, and in my heart It seemed He answered me. I said, “O, take Me nigh to Thee, Thou mighty life of life! I faint, I die; I am a child alone ’Mid the wild storm, the brooding desert night.” “Go thou, poor child, to Him who once, like thee, Trod the highways and deserts of the world.” “Thou sendest me then, wretched, from Thy sight! Thou wilt not have me—I am not worth Thy care!” “I send thee not away; child, think not so; From the cloud resting on the mountain peak, I call to guide thee in the path by which Thou mayst come soonest home unto my heart. I, I am leading thee. Think not of Him As He were one and I were one; in Him Thou wilt find me, for He and I are one. Learn thou to worship at his lowly shrine, And see that God dwelleth in lowliness.”
This passage is excerpted from part 3, scene 10 of Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem by George MacDonald, a verse play that, in 1855, was the author’s first published work.
George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a prolific Scottish writer across the genres of adult and children’s fantasy, realistic fiction, theology, poetry, and literary essay. He was the founding father of modern fantasy literature (Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith and his best-known works), a mentor to fellow writer Lewis Carroll (he was a catalyst to Carroll’s publishing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and a great influence on C. S. Lewis (who cites his writings as instrumental in his conversion to Christianity). MacDonald served for a few years as a Congregational minister, but his preaching about God’s universal love and the ultimate salvation of all (apokatastasis) rubbed against the staunchly Calvinist grain of his time and place; after resigning his pastoral post in Arundel, England, he continued preaching without pay as a layman, as well as weaving his theological views into his fiction.
Art & Theology 