Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Nina MacLaughlin – What Is the Word for Sky?

How many languages does the rain speak? Is anyone fluent in all of them? Are all of us fluent in all of them? Have you also suffered not being able to balance language with non-language? When we’re not with each other in the usual ways, not in person, so much of what we communicate—with a tick of the shoulder, the slight bow of the head, the hand through the hair, the cross...

Richard Bratby – Meet the Mozarts

The family that plays together… It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They...

Christian Wiman – Still Wilderness

What are we feeling when we are feeling joy? And where inside us does that feeling reside? Paul Tillich once said of the word faith that “it belongs to those terms which need healing before they can be used for the healing of men.” The word joy may not be quite so wounded, though I have noticed, as I have been gathering poems for a project I have been working on, that it tends...

Amit Chaudhuri-Modernism and Mimesis

MODERNISM IS STILL deeply allied to the West, both geographically and culturally. In the first place, it happened there. More importantly, it has drawn sustenance from the history of crisis that dominated Western politics and culture during the 20th century. Although crisis gave modernism its distinctive features, the movement doesn’t relate itself to this crisis through description, analysis, or representation — as, say, historiography or reportage might do. Modernism’s relation to crisis...