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.
Gerard David (Netherlandish, ca. 1455–1523), The Nativity, early 1480s. Oil on wood, 18 3/4 × 13 1/2 in. (47.6 × 34.3 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
LISTEN: “Where Is This Stupendous Stranger” | Words by Christopher Smart, 1765 | Music by Linda L. Hanson, 2012 | Performed by Fire (women’s a cappella chamber ensemble), 2020
Where is this stupendous Stranger? Prophets, shepherds, kings, advise! Lead me to my Master’s manger, Show me where my Savior lies.
O most mighty, O most holy, Far beyond the seraph’s thought, Are you then so mean and lowly As unheeded prophets taught?
O the magnitude of meekness, Worth from worth immortal sprung! O the strength of infant weakness, If eternal is so young!
God all-bounteous, all-creative, Whom no ills from good dissuade, You have come to be a native Of the very world you made.
The four verses of this Christmas hymn are excerpted from a nine-stanza poem by Christopher Smart [previously] published in Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England (London, 1765). The poem was recovered in the twentieth century and since then has received multiple new musical settings—by composers such as I-to Loh, Charles Heaton, Conrad Susa, Joan A. Fyock, Leo Nestor, Alec Wyton, Thomas Gibbs Jr., Scott M. Hyslop, and Jacques Cohen—as well as pairings with older tunes.
My favorite setting of the text is by Linda L. Hanson, the founding director of Fire, a women’s a cappella chamber ensemble in Charlottesville, Virginia. The group performs the hymn in the video above, which Fire member Mary Welby von Thelen spliced together from thirteen solitary recordings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hanson is in the top row, the third from the left.
The alliterative opening line of the hymn asks where the “stupendous Stranger” can be found—the divine one sent from heaven. Stupendous isn’t an adjective we use often. It means “causing astonishment or wonder: awesome, marvelous.” The poetic speaker begs the prophets, shepherds, and magi to divulge the location of the Christ child so that he can go and worship him.
The next two stanzas marvel at the paradoxes of the Incarnation—how Christ is “mighty” and “holy,” beyond the comprehension of even the angels, and yet “mean” (humble) and “lowly,” lying here in the dirt before us, visible, tangible, vulnerable, no longer far above us but in our very midst. What “magnitude of meekness,” what “strength of infant weakness.” The eternal one is born in time.
The omnibenevolent Creator has deigned to become part of his creation. No potential ill that he will suffer as a result—and he will suffer many and grievous ills, culminating in death by crucifixion—can deter him from making his beloved earth his home.
Hanson has generously allowed me to share the sheet music of “Where Is This Stupendous Stranger,” and says the hymn can be freely used by local church congregations. Anything outside that context will require her permission.
Josué Sánchez Cerrón (Peruvian, 1945–), Navidad en los Andes (Christmas in the Andes)
The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap.
The Word, for our sake, became agony in the shrunken breast of the woman grown old by the absence of her murdered husband.
The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger.
The Word, for our sake, became rebellion before the lifeless body of Gaspar Sanchez Toma, “scientifically” murdered.
The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her son growing into manhood.
The Word became an ever-present absence among the 70,000 families torn apart by death.
The Word, for our sake, became an inexorable accusation arising from the blazing craters which swallowed up their tortured bodies.
The word-knife cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor.
The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the Mummified-Churches, guardians of silence.
The Word, that early-morning-bugle, awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our Hope.
The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers, and a Star for those few who can inspire dreams.
The Word became Light, The Word became History, The Word became Conflict, The Word became Indomitable Spirit, and sowed its seeds upon the mountain, near the river, and in the valley,
and those-of-good-will heard the angels sing.
Tired knees were strengthened, trembling hands were stilled, and the people who wandered in darkness saw the light!
Then,
The Word became flesh in a nation-pregnant-with-freedom, The Spirit strengthened the arms which forged Hope, The Verb became flesh in the people who perceived a new day, and for our sake became life in Mary and Joseph who embrace Righteousness and bury the people’s ignominy.
The Word became the seed-of-justice and we conceived peace.
The Word cried out to the world the truth about the struggle against the anti-man.
The Word made justice to rain and peace came forth from the furrows in the land.
And we saw its glory in the eyes of the poor converted into true men and women.
Grace and Truth celebrated together in the laughter of the children rescued by life.
And those-who-saw-the-star opened up for us the path we now follow.
Meanwhile, Herod, slowly dying, is eaten by worms.
The Word became judgment and the anti-men ground their teeth.
The Word became forgiveness and human hearts learned to beat with love.
And the Word shall continue sowing futures in the furrows of Hope.
And on the horizon, the Word made light invited us to relive a thousand dawns toward the Kingdom that comes.
The Word will gather us round her table. And they will come from the East and the West, from the North and the South, and dressed in incorruption we-will-finally-be-happy.
Translated from the Spanish by Maria Elena Acevedo, René Calderón, Maria Elena Caracheo, Sister Caridad Inda, and Philip Wheaton in the bilingual Threatened with Resurrection / Amenazado de Resurreción: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan (The Brethren Press, 1982).
Julia Esquivel (1930–2019) was a Guatemalan poet, theologian, lay preacher, biblical studies teacher, social worker, and human rights activist. In 1953 she moved to Costa Rica to study at the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano, returning to Guatemala to work at the Instituto Evangélico América Latina. After speaking out against the massacres, assassinations, torture, and forced disappearances being carried out by the Guatemalan military and police, she received death threats and survived two kidnapping attempts and thus went into forced exile in 1980, finding refuge in the monastic Communauté de Grandchamp in Switzerland. She studied at the Ecumenical Institute at Château de Bossey, run by the World Council of Churches. She returned to her home country in 1996 after the signing of the Peace Accords, helping document over two hundred thousand civilian deaths and disappearances for the Recovery of Historical Memory Project and working with women traumatized by violence. She is the author of several books, including the poetry collections Threatened with Resurrection (1982) and The Certainty of Spring (1993).
POEM SERIES: “Twelve Days of Advent” by Kate Bluett: This year on her blog, writer Kate Bluett [previously] is publishing a series of original metrical verses based loosely on the cumulative song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” She calls it the Twelve Days of Advent and through it explores the theology of Christ’s coming. I love this creative, sacred spin on the popular seasonal ditty! Here’s where the series currently stands (my favorite poems are in boldface):
“A Partridge in a Pear Tree”: Bluett imagines, in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a bird singing (representing, as I take it, God’s word), but Adam and Eve heed not his song, and, taking the tree’s forbidden fruit, find themselves exiled. The bird weeps for the alienation of his two friends, and wings his way east of Eden, into the home of a young maiden, a daughter of Eve, who receives him, shelters him, an act that leads to restoration. Bluett uses some of the language of late medieval English folksong, such as “with a low, low, my love, my love” and “welaway.”
“Four Calling Birds”: This poem is brilliant. In it the four matriarchs in Jesus’s genealogy speak to Mary, tenderly calling her “Child” and rejoicing in her “bringing forth our life’s tomorrow.” Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba—they’ve long awaited redemption, and now they’re at its threshold. Mary’s yes to God’s call “set[s] [their] dry bones stirring, thrumming / with a hope [they’d] hardly dared.” They inform her that her vocation will involve great suffering (as we know, she’ll experience the brutal death of her son)—but her willingness to give up her son to the cross, to endure that rupture, will mean new life for the world.
“Six Geese a-Laying”: Picking up the Isaianic language of the wilderness being made glad, the poetic speaker sings an eschatological vision of flocks coming home to “the orchard of the rood” (rood = cross) to lay and hatch eggs in nests once empty, now brimming with life.
SUBSTACK SERIES: “Art + Advent 2025” by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt: The art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt [previously], author of Redeeming Vision and the Loving Look Substack, is one of my favorite writers. This Advent she is writing a weekly series of art reflections centered on the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love.
>> “Week 1 // Hope: Abraham’s Oak and Sarah’s Laughter”: Looking at Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting Abraham’s Oak, Weichbrodt writes about shadowy promise. She also considers, with reference to an early Byzantine mosaic of the Hospitality of Abraham, how to hope again after being wounded, as Sarah did, is a vulnerable thing. “As Advent begins, I find myself peering into a Tanner-like mist, seeing the dim outline of longed-for goodness taking shape in the distance. Sometimes I’m full of hope, but I’m also, like Sarah, sometimes full of armored laughter.”
Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859–1937), Abraham’s Oak, 1905. Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 × 28 5/8 in. (54.4 × 72.8 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
>> “Week 2 // Peace: A Stitch Pulling Tight”: “How do we do repair work in a fraying world with our own, fraying selves? What thread can stitch together all these gaping wounds?” Weichbrodt asks. She looks at Mary Weatherford’s monumental painting Gloria (new to me!), finding in the hot coral neon light blazing across the canvas resonance with Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, which portray the Light of the World as the stitch that mends the tear between God and humanity.
Mary Weatherford (American, 1963–), Gloria, 2018. Flashe paint and neon on linen, 117 × 234 in. (297.2 × 594.4 cm). High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
>> “Week 3 // Joy: Far as the Curse Is Found”: In this post, Weichbrodt explores nine Visitation paintings and one extraordinary embroidery. “Every time I see [a Visitation artwork],” Weichbrodt writes, “I encounter joy. It’s not that Mary and Elizabeth are always smiling. Often, their expressions are quite serious. But joy—deep, sustained, sustaining joy—circulates between them like an electrical current.” Justice, threshold, and fecundity are among the supplementary themes touched on.
The Visitation, England, first half of 17th century. Embroidery, 44.1 × 57 cm (framed). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Weichbrodt’s final Advent 2025 post, on love, will be published this Saturday. Weichbrodt’s final Advent 2025 post, on love, will be published this Saturday. (Update, 12/20/25: Week 4’s post, “Love In Between,” is now published. It centers on Vincent van Gogh’s painting Almond Blossoms, a gift for his newborn nephew, but also spends time with a Nativity mosaic by Pietro Cavallini and a Nativity painting by Gerard David.)
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SONGS:
Here are four newly released Christmas songs of note: two originals, one lyrical adaptation of a classic, and a new arrangement.
>> “War on Christmas” by Seryn:Seryn’s new album is titled War on Christmas. Here’s the title track:
The refrain is:
There is a war on Christmas But it’s not the one you think It’s in the news, it’s out of mind It happens overseas Cause as we sing the hymns and songs With families by our sides There is a war on Christmas Someone’s fighting to survive
“War on Christmas” is a phrase some Christian conservatives in the US use to express their feeling of having their faith traditions attacked by the sinister forces of pluralism when people or signage greet them with a generic “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” I roll my eyes big-time when I hear people complain about this, because it’s ridiculous for any American to assert that they are impeded from or ostracized for celebrating Christmas in this country, or to take offense that a stranger does not automatically assume their particular religious affiliation.
Seryn’s song affirms that yes, there is a war on Christmas—only it’s a war not against personal religious freedoms in America but against peace, love, and the other values Christ came to teach and embody. When humans wage literal wars with literal weapons, killing and maiming each other and inducing mass terror—that’s an assault against Christ’s mass, with its message of welcome and reconciliation. So, too, when we perpetuate hate, whether on personal, national, or global scales. As another Christmas song puts it, “Hate is strong and mocks the song of ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to men.’”
>> “O New Commingling! O Strange Conjunction!” by the Anachronists: The lyrics to this new song by the Anachronists [previously]—Corey Janz, Andrés Pérez González, and Jonathan Lipps—are a paraphrase from the sermon “On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ” by Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–390), one of the most influential and poetic theologians of the early church. Gregory delivered the sermon, labeled “Oration 38” in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, at Christmastime in 380 in Constantinople, where he served as bishop. In section 13, the Anachronists’ source for the song, he expresses awe at the beautiful mystery of the Incarnation. Below is an excerpt from the public-domain NPNF translation.
The Word of God Himself—Who is before all worlds, the Invisible, the Incomprehensible, the Bodiless, Beginning of Beginning, the Light of Light, the Source of Life and Immortality, the Image of the Archetypal Beauty, the immovable Seal, the unchangeable Image, the Father’s Definition and Word—came to His own Image, and took on Him flesh for the sake of our flesh, and mingled Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul’s sake, purifying like by like; and in all points except sin was made man. . . . O new commingling; O strange conjunction; the Self-Existent comes into being, the Uncreate is created, That which cannot be contained is contained. . . . He Who gives riches becomes poor, for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself, for He empties Himself of His glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His fullness. What is the riches of His goodness? What is this mystery that is around me? I had a share in the image; I did not keep it; He partakes of my flesh that He may both save the image and make the flesh immortal. He communicates a second Communion far more marvelous than the first.
>> “Away in a Manger (Then to Calvary)” by Sarah Sparks: Singer-songwriter Sarah Sparks [previously] released a new EP, Christmas Hymns, last month, comprising five classic carols, including one with revised lyrics that further draw out the significance of the Incarnation. I’m a big fan of Sparks’s voice and her no-frills acoustic style.
Away in the manger No crib for a bed The great King of Heaven Does lay down his head The stars he created Look down where he lay The little Lord Jesus Asleep on the hay
And there in the manger The Maker of earth In riches and glory? No, born in the dirt With oxen and cattle With shepherds and sheep No stranger to weakness He loves even me
And there in the manger Is our Servant-King He sits with the lowly He washes their feet Away in the manger Then to Calvary His birth, life, and death And his raising for me
And there in the manger Is my greatest friend His mercy, his patience His grace know no end Be near me, Lord Jesus For all of my days In life and in death Till we meet face to face
>> “Angels We Have Heard on High” by the Petersens: Last Friday the Petersens [previously] released a music video—shot at Wonderland Tree Farm in Pea Ridge, Arkansas—debuting their new bluegrass arrangement of one of my favorite Christmas carols. Banjo, mandolin, fiddle, acoustic guitar, dobro, upright bass—I love the instrumentation of the bluegrass genre and what it adds here, and the Petersens are consummate performers.
Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Nativity, 2016. Tempera on gessoed wood, 17.5 × 15.5 cm.
Gravity’s maker, spinner of spheres and spiraling matter, made into weight, to sweat. His own feet vulnerable, drawn flat and close against the punishing ground.
Star-strayed infant, wrapped in weight, heavy heaven. In the hollow of the years, long and narrow as a well, he waits suspended, bucket-drawn, clapper in a bell.
Ringing and ringing in the heatfolds of gravity, lines and lines of weight leaning us into each other, caught up, tumbled open-face roses in a blue bolt of thorn-pricked cloth.
God made known, fleshly God, Godlight bodied, bleeding out into wood, over stone. God from God, telluric God, shadowcast God, lightstricken God, bloodwritten. The pull
electric of low, deep center. God flesh, corpus God, Verbum corpse, light-riven. Inscribed, blooded, God-heft falling death- bitten into weighted rising, made and given; the miracle of leaven.
LeighAnna Schesser is a Catholic writer from south-central Kansas whose poetry collections include Struck Dumb with Singing (2020) and Heartland (2016).
Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
—Matthew 24:42 (KJV)
LOOK: Quote-Unquote, Hyphen, and The Point of Intersection by Kay Sage
There’s a wistful quality to the paintings of the midcentury American surrealist artist Kay Sage [previously], which often feature tenuous, draped structures and a distant light in the vast dark. The first work of hers I saw in person was Quote-Unquote, which shows a ragged, exposed architectonic form—is it fallen into disrepair, or incomplete?—whose vertical wood beams pierce the dreary gray sky.
The museum label at the Wadsworth Atheneum reads in part: “Sage’s later paintings featured vertical architectural structures, such as walls and scaffolding, set in otherwise deserted landscapes. These inanimate forms were often draped with plain fabric, as if to suggest a human presence or absence.” The title Quote-Unquote provides little interpretive help. What is being quoted here? Is irony intended?
Painted the same decade, Sage’s Hyphen shows a towering structure of open doors and windows.
And ThePoint of Intersection shows a series of wooden boards and frames standing, slightly diagonal to the viewer, on a ground that recedes into infinity. In the bottom left corner a rumpled sheet or garment lies on a squat platform.
Is the “intersection” of the title between time and eternity, or . . . ?
LISTEN: “Not Knowing When the Dawn Will Come” | Words by Emily Dickinson, ca. 1884 | Music by Jan Van Outryve, 2018 | Performed by Naomi Beeldens (voice) and Jeroen Malaise (piano) on Elysium, Emily Dickinson Project, 2018
Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door, Or has it Feathers, like a Bird, Or Billows, like a Shore –
This is one of twelve musical settings of Dickinson poems for piano and voice by the Belgian composer Jan Van Outryve. It’s sung by soprano Naomi Beeldens, with Jeroen Malaise on keys.
I’ve always read “Not knowing” as an Advent poem, as promoting a posture of readiness for the coming of Christ—he who is, as we call out in the O Antiphons of late Advent, our Oriens, Rising Sun, Dayspring. Will he come softly, rustling, avian-like, or will he come crashing onto earth’s shore like a wave?
Expecting Dawn’s imminent arrival, the speaker of the poem opens every door, welcoming its light.
From Augustine (Confessions) to Teresa of Ávila (The Interior Castle), the picture-making nunsof St. Walburga’s Abbey in Eichstätt to C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity), the human heart has long been compared to a house. To open the windows or doors of the heart to Christ is to invite him to come in and dwell there and to transform the place.
Advent commemorates threecomings of Christ: his coming in “history, mystery, and majesty,” as one priest put it. That is, Christ’s coming (1) as a babe in Bethlehem, (2) in the Spirit, to convert, illuminate, equip, and console, and in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and (3) at the end of time.
Have you opened every door to him? Do you eagerly expect him to arrive—this Christmas (are you telling, singing, enacting the story of his nativity?); into your struggles and brokenness, to companion you and to heal and strengthen; and again on earth, to unite it with heaven and establish, fully and finally, his universal reign?
This is the first post in a daily Advent and Christmastide series that will extend to January 6.I hope you follow along!
“One of poetry’s great gifts is to slow us down,” writes Peggy Rosenthal in Praying the Gospels through Poetry. “We’re used to racing ahead as we read, whether it’s a newspaper or an email memo or even an essay: language in these forms propels us forward, urging us to grab up its main points. But poetry doesn’t press ahead so much as hold us still—in the wonder of words crafted to open into another dimension.”
Below are twenty-five poems to “hold us still” this holiday season.
I’ve collected hundreds of Advent and Christmas poems over the past decade, but for this feature one of the selection criteria was that the poem must be freely available online. I chose the number twenty-five because that is standard in most Advent calendars—tools for counting down the days to Christmas. This way, you can choose, if you wish, to bookmark this page and read just one poem a day from December 1 to 25, each one a little treat.
The order progresses, in general, from Advent longing and anticipation to Christmas joy and wonder to post-nativity moments like the presentation in the temple and the visit of the magi.
1. “Advent Madrigal” by Lisa Russ Spaar: I’m not sure I understand this poem, but I like it. A madrigal is a part-song, and this is a song of waiting in simultaneous belief and doubt, of being irresistibly attracted to God’s story while also skeptical of aspects. The speaker compares the moon to a flashlight that a theater usher shines down the aisle to escort folks to their seats. What does it mean that “the treetops sough // & seize with” escape? Escape from what? And that the earth has been purloined? I don’t know, but the final couplet really lands for me—about how in the dark night of our not-knowing, we make our Advent wreaths, decking them with evergreens, their round shape an O of lament and awe before the yet-to-be-seen.
Source: University of Virginia Office of Engagement
2. “Prayer” by John Frederick Nims: The first in a sequence of five poems, “Prayer” expresses a sense of emptiness and desire, beckoning an unnamed one whom I read as Christ to come and fill. “Come to us, conceiver, / You who are all things, held and holder. / . . . / Come, infinite answer to our infinite want.”
3. “how he is coming then” by Lucille Clifton: This poem is part of a sequence on the life of Mary; it appears between “mary’s dream” (on the Annunciation) and “holy night” (on Mary’s ecstatic birthing experience). In answer to the title, Clifton gives three similes.
4. “Advent 2” by Anna A. Friedrich: This poem is the second in a series of Advent villanelles commissioned by the poet’s church in Boston last year to converse with one or more of the lectionary readings for each week of the season. Malachi 3:1–4 is the primary touchstone here, a formidable prophetic passage that compares God in the day of his coming to a blazing fire that refines metal. Stanza 3 references the fiery repentance-preaching of John the Baptist from Luke 3:1–6, and then Friedrich draws in another, unexpected “fire” text: Daniel 3, in which three young Hebrew men are thrown into a furnace by a Babylonian king for their refusal to worship his gods but are preserved from harm when a mysterious fourth person appears with them in the flames. Friedrich connects this story to the promise that the earth and its inhabitants will not be wholly consumed in the fire of God’s judgment—only the impurities, the dross, will be destroyed, so that all may be restored to their truest selves. Hence why, in Friedrich’s words, “We pray for His fire. We trust this flame.”
5.“Desert Blossoming” by Amit Majmudar: A reflection on the messianic promise of Isaiah 35:1–2, this poem celebrates how, through the deserts of Israel, Jesus “scattered his verses on the secretly gravid ground,” causing the wilderness to blossom. Majmudar mentions red, the color of fire (an image he connects to the light of faith), rhyming it with “bled.” Although he uses this final word in the sense of spreading into or through—oases bleeding into one another as dry land becomes water—one can’t help but think of Jesus’s sacrificial death, his blood extraordinarily fertile, producing life.
Joseph Stella (American, 1877–1946), Tree, Cactus, Moon, ca. 1928. Gouache on paper, 104.1 × 68.6 cm. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
6.“Name One Thing New”by Seth Wieck: This six-line poem takes the Teacher of Ecclesiastes to task, responding to his cynical claim that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9) with a counterexample.
7.“For My Mother at Advent” by Brian Volck: The poet recalls a simple Advent tradition his mother established in his childhood and reflects on her spiritual legacy, her lifetime of Christ-inspired kindnesses that continue to pillow him. How might we soften the hardness of the world for others?
8. “Advent” by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes: This stunning poem makes unlikely intertextual connections, bringing Matthew 19:24 (one of Jesus’s hard sayings regarding wealth) to bear on John 1. Its unique angle on the Incarnation and its evocative imagery have inspired an experimental jazz composition and several paintings.
9. “An Hymn to Humanity” by Phillis Wheatley: “Lo! for this dark terrestrial ball / Forsakes his azure-pavèd hall / A prince of heav’nly birth!” So begins this poem on the Incarnation by Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784), the first African American to publish a book of poetry. In stanzas 2 and 3, God the Father dispatches the Son to establish his throne on earth, “enlarg[ing] the close contracted mind, / And fill[ing] it with thy fire.” The “languid muse” in stanza 5 refers to Wheatley herself, whereas the “celestial nine” are the ancient Greek inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. The “smiling Graces” is another classical reference.
Michael Wolgemut (German, 1434–1519), The Father sending the Son into the world, 1491. Hand-colored woodcut from the Schatzbehalter (published by Anton Koberger, Nuremberg), 43.7 × 27.5 cm. British Museum, London.
10. “In My Hand” by Sarah Robsdottir: Mary remembers the moment she conceived Jesus, one ordinary day when sitting down to a bowl of lentil stew.
Source: Aleteia, April 9, 2018
11. “The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973”by Madeleine L’Engle: Best known for her children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle was also a poet. Here she compares our era to the one in which Jesus was born—both are characterized by violence and hate, and yet Jesus, the embodiment of divine love, willingly entered the peril.
12. “On Another’s Sorrow” by William Blake: Through the Incarnation, God lovingly, humanly, entered the world of human woe to experience it firsthand. “He doth give His joy to all,” Blake writes: “He becomes an infant small, / He becomes a man of woe, / He doth feel the sorrow too.” I featured this poem about Emmanuel, God-with-us, in a musical setting by singer-songwriter David Benjamin Blower in 2023 but was surprised that Blower omitted Blake’s final stanza, whose closing couplet I find striking, as it conveys Jesus’s continued identification with and compassion for humanity, how he moans alongside us in our suffering. For a different musical interpretation, also in an acoustic indie folk mode, see the one by Portland-based artist Michael Blake, from his 2021 album Songs of Innocence and Experience:
Source: Songs of Innocence and Experience (London, 1794). Public Domain.
13.“Missing the Goat”by Lorna Goodison: An immigrant from Kingston, Jamaica, to Toronto, Ontario, Goodison writes of the heightened feeling of exile but also of creative adaptations during the holidays as she tries to carry out the food traditions of her native country on a foreign soil where some of the ingredients are in more limited supply. For the sorrel wine, traditionally made with roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) petals, tropically grown, she has to make do with redbuds. And the local shops have run out of goat meat—“the host of yardies” (people of Jamaican origin) who’ve moved to the area have already bought it all up—so “we’ll feast then on curried some-other-flesh.” Despite the differences from home, Christmas is still Christmas, and she raises her “hybridized wassail cup” to her new place, her new neighbors (many of them, like her, also recent arrivals from the Caribbean), and the creation of new rituals in multicultural Toronto.
Source: Controlling the Silver (University of Illinois Press, 2010); compiled in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2017)
14. “Word Made Flesh”by Kathleen Raine: Awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her significant contributions to literature and culture, Raine has been described as a mystical and visionary poet. Here is her revoicing of John 1. What a powerful last two lines!
15.“Nativity”by Barbara Crooker: In the heavy dark, in the windy cold, “love is born in the world again” every December when we retell the story of Christ’s birth.
Gary Kuehn (American, 1939–), Straw Pillow, 1963. Straw, plaster. Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany, Inv. ML/SK 5185. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
16. “First Miracle”by A. E. Stallings: The first miracle Jesus performed, according to the Gospel of John, was turning water into wine. Stallings reflects on an earlier miracle performed by his mother’s body, and all birth-giving mothers’: turning nutrients from her blood into milk.
17.“What Sweeter Music Can We Bring” (or “A Christmas Carol, sung to the King in the Presence at Whitehall”)by Robert Herrick: “The Darling of the world is come”! Originally written as a song for soloists (each number corresponds to a different singer) and chorus, this poem reverses the typical seasonal imagery of Christmas, remarking how, at Jesus’s birth, “chilling Winter’s morn / Smile[s] like a field beset with corn” and “all the patient ground [is turned] to flowers.” The original music by Henry Lawes is lost, but many contemporary composers have written settings of the text, most famously John Rutter.
Source: Hesperides: Or, Works Both Human and Divine (London, 1648). Public Domain.
18.“Sharon’s Christmas Prayer”by John Shea: A five-year-old recounts the Christmas story, and when she reaches the clincher, she can’t hold back her glee.
19.“God”by D. A. Cooper: Riffing on Williams Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” this spare poem attends to the birth and death of the incarnate God, upon which so much depends.
Source: Reformed Journal, September 3, 2024
Katarzyna Malinowska (Polish, 1989–), Juxtapose (diptych), 2021. Digital painting, 20 × 30 cm.
20. “Lullaby after Christmas”by Vassar Miller: The speaker wishes sweet sleep for the newborn Christ child, wishes to keep him innocent of his fate for as long as possible—for “even God has right to / Peace before His pain.” Consisting of four sestets whose second, fourth, and sixth lines rhyme, the poem has a sing-songy quality that is jarring for the juxtaposition of words like “soft,” “warm,” and “tinkling” with the likes of “blood,” “gore,” and “die.”
21. “Journey of the Magi”by T. S. Eliot: Eliot wrote this poem shortly after his conversion to Christianity in 1927. Opening with a passage from a Christmas sermon by the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop Lancelot Andrewes, it is from the perspective of one of the magi, who made a long, toilsome journey in search of the meaning of a mysterious guiding star. After the magi’s encounter with the Christ child, they would never be the same; their paganism would no longer satisfy. The poem is about the transformative impact Christ has on those with humility enough to see him for who he is (having followed the light of revelation) and to worship him accordingly. And that transformation is in some ways painful, as it involves giving up some of the things one once held dear.
“Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” the magus asks. Jesus’s wasn’t the only birth they witnessed; they, too, were (re)born in Bethlehem. But spiritual rebirth is also a sort of death—the magi died to their old selves and false loves and loyalties. Thus, when they returned to Babylon, they felt like strangers in a strange land. They were now citizens of a different kingdom, and filled with a longing for its consummation.
Source: Journey of the Magi (Ariel Poems) (Faber & Gwyer, 1927). Public Domain.
Jörg Länger (German, 1964–), The Three Kings, 2013. Linocut and gesso on aluminum dibond, 38 × 38 cm. The linocut is after a 12th-century illumination from the St Albans Psalter, held at the Dombibliothek, Hildesheim, Germany.
22. “Twelfth Night”by Sally Thomas: (Scroll to second poem.) As the Christmas season draws to a close, holly berries shrivel and drop, the “candles drown themselves in waxen lakes,” “the tree’s a staring corpse,” and a spider has built a web across the mantel nativity. Thomas uses the passing of the season to reflect more broadly on the passing of time and our own dustiness and desiccation—and by contrast, the unchangeability of God.
23. Untitled poemby S. E. Reid: Most reflections on the New Year are full of enthusiastic goal-setting and go-getting, but Reid, gardening in her greenhouse in the crisp cold of January, describes a “fall[ing] backwards,” “dropping into the dark,” “shivering,” herself a seed, latent in the soil, trusting God that growth will come.
24. “Anna the Prophetess” by Tania Runyan: Forty days after Jesus’s birth, Mary and Joseph presented him in the Jerusalem temple. Runyan imagines this event from the perspective of Anna, a woman who was widowed young and thenceforth lived at the temple into old age, devoted to prayer, fasting, praise, and prophecy.
25. “The Work of Christmas”by Howard Thurman: Drawing on Jesus’s mission statement in Luke 4, the great African American theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman urges us to continue the work of Christmas—finding, healing, feeding, etc.—throughout the year. Listen to the simple yet vigorous choral setting by Elizabeth Alexander.
ONLINE COURSE: Studying the novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky with Brian Zahnd, January 3–March 9, 2026: This ten-week online course led by Pastor Brian Zahnd (a Christian writer and preacher I admire) will explore Dostoevsky’s “darkest and most prophetic novel”: Demons (aka The Possessed or The Devils), a social and political satire, psychological drama, and large-scale tragedy inspired by the true story of a 1869 political murder in Russia. The course sounds intriguing to me, and I’m contemplating whether I can invest the time in a seven-hundred-page book—but I did buy a copy just in case! It’s the only one of the literary master’s four novels I haven’t read.
“Dostoevsky’s Demons changed me,” Zahnd writes on Substack. “From it I learned the danger of giving oneself to an ism instead of to Christ. Isms are idols and they often become demonic. Admittedly Demons is a difficult novel, but it’s also prophetic and timely. . . . As you read Demons, expect to be horrified, but also expect to laugh—you are meant to. During the course we will be horrified and warned, but we will also laugh and learn together.”
The live Q&As will take place the first ten Mondays of 2026 at 5 p.m. CT (6 p.m. ET).
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SEMINAR (VIDEO):“How to Watch a Movie (as a Christian)” with Chris Retts and Morgan Jefferson: On his FootnotesSubstack, historian Jemar Tisby recently hosted a teach-in with two team members from the Los Angeles Film Studies Center, a nonprofit educational program designed to give undergraduate students at Christian colleges and universities meaningful experience in the film industry during a semester “abroad” in Los Angeles. Chris Retts is the director of the center, and Morgan Jefferson is an instructor.
Before discussing how to watch a movie, they discuss why Christians should watch movies in the first place, beyond the obvious (enjoyment):
Because general revelation can happen anywhere, even at the movies (Rom. 1:20).
Because movies generate empathy, which is central to the greatest commandment (Matt. 22:37–40).
Because every movie has a theology, and media literacy makes it conscious and discernable (1 John 4:1).
They also discuss the four modes of meaning that filmmakers work with; cinematic language; and four steps for exegeting (“drawing out”) a film.
How does film relate to Dr. Tisby’s work at the intersection of faith, history, and justice? He has written for years about the dangers of white Christian nationalism. He says adherents of that ideology, or any, are not evaluating a list of propositions but are buying into a narrative; and “you can’t meet a narrative with logical reasoning,” he says. “You have to invite them into a counter-narrative—a more beautiful story.” Story is why he’s interested in film, as film is an engaging, and probably the most popular (in the US), storytelling medium. “Stories shape our sense of what’s true, what’s possible, and who belongs. That’s as true for political movements as it is for movies.”
DOCUMENTARY SHORT: The Quilters (2024), dir. Jenifer McShane: This thirty-minute documentary on Netflix follows a group of men in a maximum-security prison in Missouri who design and sew custom quilts for children in foster care using donated fabrics and old machines. They care deeply about the quality of their work—they’re proud of what they make—and are emotional about the recipients, some of whom send thank-you cards. The film is about creating beauty and meaning within strict confines, not letting destructive choices from your past stymie you from making constructive ones in the present.
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TEMPORARY INSTALLATION: To Breathe—Mokum by Kimsooja, Oude Kerk (Old Church), Amsterdam, May 23–November 9, 2025: Sorry I didn’t get this out while the installation was still up (it wrapped on Sunday), but please do explore the photographic documentation. Kimsooja’s To Breathe—Mokum explores themes of migration, belonging, and the transient nature of home; the Yiddish word in its subtitle means “safe haven.” “At the work’s heart are Kimsooja’s iconic bottari—colorful textile bundles inspired by traditional Korean wrapping cloths,” designboom writes. “Spread across the [medieval] stone floor of the church, these bundles are filled with clothing donated by members of Amsterdam’s diverse communities. Each piece of clothing represents the lives and stories of the people who contribute to the city’s rich multicultural fabric. These textile bundles serve as symbols of both personal and collective journeys, embodying the arrival and departure of individuals who have shaped the identity of the city” over its 750 years.
Kimsooja (Korean, 1957–), To Breathe—Mokum (partial view), 2025. Site-specific installation at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam. Photo: Natascha Libbert.
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POEMS:
>> “On the Staten Island Ferry” by A. E. Stallings, Plough, July 1, 2025: Liberty is an American ideal—but for many in this country, an illusory one. Riding in New York Harbor with a boatload of commuters and tourists, Stallings lets settle what a young girl, pointing to the Statue of Liberty, exclaims.
>> “The Pillar of Cloud and Fire”by Anna A. Friedrich, Monafolkspeak (Substack), October 29, 2025: The poet reflects on her confusion as a child about this manifestation of God from the Old Testament, which leads her to surprising insights.
Art & Theology 