A Church of One's Own:
John Patrick Shanley's Woolfian Project

Martha Greene Eads

Playwright John Patrick Shanley’s op-ed essay in the February 11, 2013 issue of the New York Times leaves no doubt about his attitude toward Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to step down from the papacy. Good riddance, harrumphs Shanley, charging that Benedict “was utterly bereft of charm, tone-deaf and a protector of pedophiles. In addition to this woeful resume, he had no use for women.” After launching his essay with that provocative and highly personal attack, Shanley articulates his more generalized complaint about the Catholic Church:  Read More

From Commodity to Community
Churches and the Land They Own:

Gilson A. C. Waldkoenig

A number of churches, camps, and other religious organizations recently have begun to take care of land in ways that express ecological vision. Turning from human-defined assessments of place, they are reorienting themselves toward God’s continual creativity in the earth and carving out a place for God’s creation in settings otherwise defined wholly in terms of human demographics. These congregations are developing practices that express greater awareness of human interrelatedness with creation and of how their properties are thresholds to the presence of Christ in all creation.  Read More

The Development of Liturgical Artist
Ernst Schwidder

Joel Nickel

In September of 2011, the archives of liturgical artist Ernst Schwidder arrived at Valparaiso University, after hitchhiking all the way from Seattle/Tacoma in the back of a semi-trailer loaded with organ pipes. The archives consisted of 240 three-foot mailing tubes filled with rolled-up architectural drawings and sketches, plus boxes of files, records, photos, and slides. Since Schwidder’s art is installed in approximately three hundred churches across the United States, the only actual work in the collection was a six-foot crucifix of carved mahogany, a gift of his daughter, Anna, to the University’s Brauer Museum.  Read More

Rethinking Service

Samuel Wells

The 1992 novel and 1996 film The English Patient is set in Egypt during the Second World War (Ondaatje 1992; Minghella 1996). A married Englishwoman, Katherine, finds herself often alone as her husband pursues a ­cartographical expedition. She falls in love with an impossibly exotic Hungarian nobleman, Laszlo. Count Laszlo, another cartographer, discovers a wondrous cave, decorated with prehistoric paintings, deep in the Sahara Desert. Laszlo and Katherine fall into a passionate affair. Katherine’s husband, sensing the affair, plans a murderous revenge. Read More

Faithfully Present

Jeffrey P. Bouman

This essay offers a historical review of the different ways that service has been incorporated in church-related higher education during the past century. This review will orient readers to the various “models” of service in higher education as well as, hopefully, shed light on both how and why particular faith-based colleges and universities have engaged in service activity. My approach will be historical, and it will have a twentieth-century focus. The challenge in an overview like this is to tell parallel stories without conflating them too much:  Read More

Minding the Common Good

Regina Wentzel Wolfe

Even a cursory look at the mission ­statements of Christian-affiliated colleges and universities makes it clear that, among other things, these institutions share a commitment to educating students for leadership and service to church and society. There are many ways to understand service, but this essay will address service from what some might consider a rather narrow perspective: mission integration and organizational ethics. The task of attending to the creation of an ethical institutional culture is a form of service in that it allows our colleges and universities to integrate more fully the values and vision that inform their mission. Read More

My Eyre Affair

Lisa Deam

I knew that I should have demurred when a member of my book group suggested that we read Jane Eyre. Or I should have skipped the meeting at which our discussion took place. Although some in our number were encountering Charlotte Brontë’s classic tale for the first time, its characters have walked with me for much of my life.I knew, or at least suspected, that I wasn’t ready to distance myself from them. I wasn’t ready to assign words to my passion for a coming-of-age story so rooted in my own journey through the world. Up to this point, I never had read Jane Eyre as an assignment. Read More

Reviving the Dead

Gary Fincke

When my wife and I are dressed and healthy, her body temperature registers eight-tenths of a degree colder than my ordinary one of 98.6. She shivers in any weather below seventy degrees. Occasionally, in central Pennsylvania, she wears gloves in May and September.It’s not much use joking about how she’s farther from fever, how sweaters become her, how her jackets are stylish and smart.   Read More

The Incorruptible Youth of Poetry

Stephanie V. Sears

Despite increasingly sophisticated and easily available acoustic and visual distractions, despite an incipient but growing aspiration toward robotic standards of performance, despite a proud faith in science and rationalism commonly opposed to lyricism as its contrary, the taste for poetry persists, not only as an aesthetic distraction but as a means to understand and experience the world. While some may disdain poetry as a futile activity left to those dreamy cicadas among us, for a significant number of others poetry emerges as a means of understanding life with more immediacy and greater breadth than science or philosophy can afford.  Read More

A Caravaggio Meditation

Edmund N. Santurri

My candidate for the greatest Christian painter in the history of the West is the seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi, better known as “Caravaggio.”1 “Caravaggio” is actually the name of the place in Northern Italy where Merisi was born, or at least spent a good bit of his young life (historians are not agreed on this matter). Thus, “Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.” The artist sometimes signed his name that way, but among art historians he is known as just “Caravaggio.” Of all his paintings, my favorite is called variously “The Taking of Christ,” “The Betrayal of Christ,” “The Arrest of Christ,” or “The Kiss of Judas”... Read More

The Scientist’s Finger

Thomas Cathcart

Paul Tillich used to tell his classes about a scientist at Harvard who approached him to say he would not be attending Tillich’s public lecture that evening because he knew it would be irrational. Tillich invited him to “please come, sit in the front row, and anytime I say something you think is irrational, raise your finger, so I will know.” “No,” said the scientist, “I would have my finger raised the whole time.” Read More

Arrested Development:
The Films of Kenneth Lonergan

Fredrick Barton

By the time he was thirty-eight years old in 2000, Kenneth Lonergan was already an established playwright with enough New York productions and award nominations on his resume to constitute a distinguished career for a man two decades his senior. He had also already dipped his toe into the more financially lucrative world of Hollywood by selling his spec script for the mob comedy Analyze This (1999) that eventually starred Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro. Then Lonergan wrote and directed You Can Count on Me (2000), a film that was both a commercial success and a critical smash.  Read More

Brain Memoirs:
Thinking About Thinking

Harold K. Bush

Just over forty years ago, Hal Lindsey published his harrowing account of the apocalypse, The Late, Great Planet Earth. One of Lindsey’s key texts for prophesying the end of the world was Daniel 12:4, which describes a time when “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Little did he know, in the early 1970s, how prescient those words would become for today’s “millennials” in the light of the Internet’s climb to cultural dominance. To and fro, indeed.  Read More

The Knight of Faith and The Dark Knight

Ross Moret

At first glance, and perhaps even at second and third glances, it may seem strange to place the names of Søren Kierkegaard and Bruce Wayne in the same sentence. However, Christopher Nolan’s recent trilogy of Batman films—Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012)—explore many of the same themes as the work of the Danish, existentialist philosopher. Nolan’s hero confronts fear, dread, loss, and isolation, human experiences that are among Kierkegaard’s deepest concerns.  Read More

Called to the Unbidden
Saving Vocation from the Market

Jason A. Mahn

In his recent What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, American political philosopher Michael Sandel points to hundreds of cases where encroachments of “the Market” on goods that used to be priceless have corroded our civic values and our sense of civic togetherness. Some of the Market’s expansions are irksome but perhaps morally inconsequential: the trend toward monetizing gifts through those once-tacky gift cards, the scalping of campsite tickets for Yosemite National Park, or the corporate renaming of professional baseball parks. Read More

The Mediator Is the Message
Some Retrospective Readings of Thomas Lynch's
The Sin-Eater: A Breviary

Brett Foster

Before even reading the poet Thomas Lynch’s latest collection, The Sin-Eater: A Breviary (2012), I felt a certain satisfaction relating to it, and then soon enough, I was aware of a second satisfaction, one likewise unrelated to whatever potential satisfactions of the poems per se. Fear not, considerations of Lynch’s poetry both old and new will appear presently, but first, let me explain these first impressions of satisfaction. In fact, they are impressions suited to the central work of this essay: to offer some illustrative readings of The Sin-Eater and to make an account of Lynch’s themes and aims across his several books, from the perspective of this latest volume, which is itself an obvious culmination, a fulfillment.  Read More

George F. Kennan and the Hubris of Power

Mel Piehl

George Frost Kennan remains a name to be reckoned with, even beyond the world of American international relations and diplomatic history (or as today’s historians say, “America in the world”) where he made his primary mark. Generations of foreign affairs and history students came of age reading Kennan’s crisply written American Diplomacy (1951), and no American history survey is complete without citing Kennan’s most famous achievement: formulating the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War.  Read More