Elysian Fields

The Elysian Fields veer East coast-ward,  and if you’re looking down from Heaven, you’d see someone on 11th street and Washington  had a crazy sense of humor. In Hoboken they play baseball on the soft, swept grass. In Hades, sunners sunbathe, relieved and insolent like they’d won some game,  their good deeds shining back like a UV reflector visible across the Hudson river and the River Lethe.  All the while Tantalus sits nearby contemplating suicide. He fails to carry out the act, realizing with a pitiful moan that he is already dead—  but he quickly forgets. He sits, benched until

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J I Packer

Six Beautiful Truths About Dr. J.I. Packer

by Daniel Gilman
Globally famous, constantly published, and intensely shy, the Reverend Dr. J.I. Packer enriched the faith of millions throughout the world through his hundreds of published books, essays, and articles. Dr. Packer passed away on July 17, 2020 at the age of ninety-three, leaving a hole in the lives of everyone who knew him, heard him speak, or read his work.

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The Seven Works of Mercy: How two Dutch artworks—one Renaissance, one contemporary—can help us recover an ethic of neighborly care

by Victoria Emily Jones
In early modern Europe most of what passed for social welfare was organized and run by confraternities, or lay brotherhoods. An extension of the Church system, membership consisted of upper-class men and women who ran the city’s hospitals, hostels, orphanages, eldercare facilities, and shelters for prostitutes and widows. They also managed the distribution of food, medicine, alms, and dowries to the poor—all in the name of Christ.

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Easter 2020

Like all of us, I have been drawn deeply into this strange Easter when so much of the outwardly familiar has been taken away, and yet the inwardly familiar, the great Easter story of Death and Resurrection, has suddenly been renewed and become more agonisingly close, more vividly relevant to our lives than ever. But, like so many, I am deeply distressed at not being able to gather in church this morning, and to receive communion in community, to meet Christ ‘risen in bread, and revelling in wine’, as I put it in a sonnet long ago. But this Easter

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EMILY’S VIRTUES

Before her fingers lost
their cunning—my mother-
in-law, last of a generation
of refugees from up north—
we’d shell peas

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ANGELS EVERYWHERE

Some days I notice angels everywhere,
light glancing through windows, flying
through the glass as if through air.

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Book review: Hermann Hesse: Phoenix Arising. By Ron Dart

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Hanging above the mantle in Ron Dart’s living room is a large oil painting of a sea-battered coastal landscape featuring an old lighthouse nestled amongst tall, wispy, and sun-browned grass on an otherwise barren landscape. The symbol of the lighthouse is telling for how the author of thirty-plus books, including The North American High Tory Tradition and Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism, has been influenced by the countercultural icon, Hermann Hesse.

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Book review: The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill. By Robyn Wrigley-Carr

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Much significant work has been written on the life and prolific writing of Evelyn Underhill (certainly one of the most significant writers on the mystical life in the first half of thetwentieth century), but the research done on the impact of Baron Friedrich von Hugel on Underhill has tended to be leaner, thinner, and less developed. The sheer beauty and brilliance of this recent book by Wrigley-Carr on Underhill is the way the close and symbiotic relationship between von Hugel and Underhill is carefully and thoughtfully tracked and traced. The fact that Eugene Peterson wrote a rather lengthy foreword to

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Joe Henry Sings a Dark and Romantic Gospel in the Wake of a Cancer Prognosis

In the liner notes to his latest album, The Gospel According to Water, poetic songwriter and prestigious producer Joe Henry emphasized twice that “where a song comes from is not what a song is.” He’s at once saying that these thirteen raw, sinewy, and intimate poems—written in rapid inspiration last year and recorded in spare, demo-like takes after Henry was diagnosed with prostate cancer in November of 2018—are not autobiographical, but are “songs about finding light” in the midst of overcast circumstances.

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Total Comradeship: Simone Weil and Attention to the Afflicted Other

One morning when she was twenty-six years old, Simone Weil waited outside an unemployment office, hoping to find more factory work. She’d been fired from her previous factory job and needed to find another. That morning, she did not find the work she needed; instead, she found something “miraculous” that transcended the grim business of factory work and unemployment. She found “total comradeship” with two fellow job seekers: a fifty-eight-year-old man interested in photography and an eighteen-year-old man with a taste for drawing. Weil writes of the encounter in her Factory Journal, “Total comradeship. For the first time in my

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