Debra Dean Murphy

The poet’s essays are winsome and articulate, wide-ranging and intellectually rigorous.

I wanted to introduce my students to Muslims, not just to Islam.

10 writers respond.

In the face of unprecedented assaults on planet Earth, what good is poetry?

A church on my street fed food-insecure kids while schools were closed. The work of justice flowed outward from the table.

Sin distorts the reciprocity for which God made us.

When arguments fail us, we turn to words of wonder.

Moonlight is hard to watch—but also essential viewing—because of what it reveals about us as humans.

Arguments about common concerns are most likely to be compelling in person—but that doesn't stop us from trying to make them on social media.

Resident Aliens helped convince a generation that there is no Christian identity apart from the church. But where exactly is Hauerwas and Willimon's "adventuresome" church?

With the imposition of ashes imminent—this stark ritual signalling the onset of a season starker still in its confrontations with mortality and its fleshly (and fleshy) deprivations—I am reading about food. Glorious food.

In 1595, the English Jesuit Robert Southwell wrote “The Burning Babe,” a startling, unsettling poem about the incarnation—which means, given Southwell’s rich theological imagination and deep Catholic piety, that it is also a poem about suffering and salvation. And about the human predilection to resist divine love. Three hundred seventy-one years later, Denise Levertov penned “Advent 1966.″

We live small lives.

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It seems odd in this era of “pervasive cultural irony” (David Foster Wallace) that Americans are so prone to sentimentality. We have been schooled to be cool with the shocking, the disgusting, the daring, the outrageous–to strike postures of ironic detachment and to mask our true feelings by displaying their opposite: indifference, say, for disappointment or amusement for anger. Having recently attended a reading featuring the poetry and fiction of undergraduates, I submit as anecdotal evidence a roomful of students and professors who winced not a whit as bland and clinical reportage about post-adolescent sexual experimentation was lauded as literary art.

Last week in my Christian Ethics course we talked about love. God’s love. Human love. Love and sexuality. Loving the whole of God’s creation.

A boy, the son of a zookeeper, grows up in picturesque Pondicherry, India. He is bright and inquisitive and unusually attuned to the world around him. He is, by place of birth, a Hindu, and a devout one. He discovers Christianity (“Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ”), and then finds the religion of Allah, especially its profound witness to the practice of daily prayer, to be life-giving. His parents are perplexed.

Our assignment last week in my poetry class was to write a sonnet–English or Italian, our choice. But when it comes to sonnets, that, in many ways, is where the freedom seems to end. You can’t write as many lines as you want (has to be 14, of course). You can’t make it rhyme–or not–however you might like (must be abab, cdcd, efef, gg for the English kind).  Line length is non-negotiable, too:five “feet” of “iambs” (unstressed syllables followed by stressed ones). Sonnets and the poets who write them take their metrics very, very seriously.