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July 2016

July 15, 2016

Poetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”

What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in...

July 14, 2016

C.S. Lewis, Less Than Magical

I first encountered C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, then quickly consumed The Screwtape Letters, The...

July 13, 2016

The Cult of Emotion

As a newish, struggling Christian recovering from two years in a fundamentalist youth group, I...

July 12, 2016

Eat the Delicious Earth

A year ago, I started cooking and learning how to prepare and love food in...

July 11, 2016

Gotta Dance

My mother was a dancer. I use the term dancer in the most flexible possible...

July 08, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Again to Port Soderick”

To behold God’s creation and to praise it with language is this poem—and it is...

July 07, 2016

The Vegan at Our Chicken Slaughter

A few years ago, we invited the newest neighbor in our rural intentional Christian community...

July 06, 2016

Boyhood and the Incarnation of Time

The hardest part of watching Boyhood for me wasn’t the film itself but going back...

July 05, 2016

Adam Zagajewski’s Trench Warfare

“Writing poems is a duel / that no one wins…” As I’m reading the poem...

July 01, 2016

Poetry Friday: “For Whom the Resurrection Is the Full Moon Rising” by Mark Wagenaar

This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to...

June 2016

June 30, 2016

The Dragon and the Yahrzeit Candle: On Forgetting and Remembering, Part 3

Continued from yesterday and Tuesday. In Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape,...

June 29, 2016

The Dragon and the Yahrzeit Candle: On Forgetting and Remembering, Part 2

Continued from yesterday. I dive into the pool. My body remembers water. My body remembers...

June 28, 2016

The Dragon and the Yahrzeit Candle: On Forgetting and Remembering, Part 1

I remember my social security number. I remember the combination to a lock—13 right, 27...

June 27, 2016

Dead People: Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)

For Gregory Wolfe The following is an excerpt from Meis’s new book Dead People, published...

June 24, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Daybreak, Winter” by Betsy Sholl

I have a complicated relationship with the sun, having grown up in southern California and...

June 23, 2016

God Ponders the Heart

In Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, the writers frame the story in such a way that the...

June 22, 2016

Psychotherapy, A Love Story

For Jessica Mesman Griffith A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing...

June 21, 2016

Knee Walk

By Grace Talusan We stumbled onto the bus in Lisbon, sleepy after the overnight flight...

June 20, 2016

My HIV Test

By Paul Luikart Here’s something I never told my parents: some years ago I got...

June 17, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Tenebrae” by Anya Krugovoy Silver

This is a dark poem, raising a profound question about suffering. Its title, “Tenebrae,” is...

June 16, 2016

Pieces of Resistance

We've beat records for rain this year in central Minnesota. The sidewalks are pillowed with...

June 15, 2016

More Incisive, More Powerful, More Permanent: Cast Your Vote for Image!

A political season is upon us. I’m guessing that whatever your party affiliation or philosophical...

June 14, 2016

Fifty Shores of Grief

I write this the evening of June 12, 2016, the day forty-nine people died in the...

June 13, 2016

Eden at the Indy 500

I managed to live in Indiana for forty years before visiting the Indianapolis 500. A...

June 10, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Quantum Theory” by Victoria Kelly

A friend said to me once, if time were flat, if everything were always happening...

June 09, 2016

The Best Conditions for Work

For William Carlos Williams I work best alone. In an empty house. When I’m ready...

June 08, 2016

The Strength of God’s Gaze

By Laura Bramon The first time I saw her, I made up a story about...

June 07, 2016

A Letter To My Sister

Eve, my sister The one who took the fall Eve, my sister Mother of us...

June 06, 2016

Who’s Your Daddy?

Adoptive parents develop radar for insensitive language and story lines pretty quickly. Wes Anderson’s simplistic...

June 03, 2016

“Translation Back into Native Tongues” by Nicholas Samaras

There’s a sub-genre of poetry in which the speaker’s persona is a long-ago figure or...