Jill Peláez Baumgaertner
Once in the West: Poems, by Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman offers further evidence that his voice is among the most compelling in contemporary poetry. These poems are filled with theological conundrums, unanswered questions, brutal answers to questions never formed, and above all, contradictions.
A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor never wrote just for herself, God, and an elite group of peers. She was eager for an audience with ears to hear about grace.
Poetry chronicle
Philip C. Kolin is one of the growing tribe of very fine Christian poets whose work has often been sequestered in the limited venues of independent publishers. His newest collection is a beautifully printed, small hardcover volume that fits comfortably in the palm of the hand. But these are not small or comfortable poems.
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (5 volumes)
This encyclopedia provides a surprisingly complete collection of entries on American poetry and poets from the...
Hints of redemption
Poetry reviews appear in religious journals more rarely than poems, and poems are rare enough....
The Poems of Rowan Williams
Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury since 2002, is the first Welshman in 1,000 years to hold the office....
A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry
A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry.
Edited by Ann Hostetler. University of Iowa Press, 199 pp., $19.95 paperback.
...The St. Matthew Passion, by John Reeves
This book defies any effort to categorize it according to genre. To begin with, it is a series of meditations on one of the greatest pieces of Western music, J. S. Bach's St....
The Poets' Jesus, by Peggy Rosenthal
Edwin Mims published The Christ of the Poets, an examination of images of Christ in English and American poetry, more than 50 years ago....
Paul: A Novel, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
The uneasy genre of biblical fiction often includes what Flannery O’Connor called the “shoddy religious novel,” filled with shallow characters and plot structures as clichéd and melodramatic as 195...
Disasters and deformities
Several years have passed since I last encountered a book by Annie Dillard, but her images remain as strong in the memory as Proust's madeleine. Her gaze concentrates on the ordinary until it is transformed into the transcendent: a tree so intensely colored that it gives off light; a sky's invisible clouds revealed only in reflected images on the surface of a glassy lake; a bowl of pond water where one-celled creatures are visible to the naked eye.