This book examines how Gwendolyn Brooks, a self-proclaimed nonreligious person, advocates adherence to Christian ideals through religious allusions in her poetry. The discussion integrates Brooks' words, biographical data, commentary by other scholars, scriptural references, and doctrinal tenets. It identifies biblical figures and events and highlights Brooks' effective use of the sermon genre, and her express parallels between Christianity and Democracy. The work opens with a biographical chapter and Brooks' comments on religion, followed by analyses of her long poems, and more than thirty of her short ones. An illuminating interview with Nora Brooks Blakely about Brooks' religious background and philosophy is included.
A collection of poems, centering around a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church, creates compelling dramas out of small moments.
This daily devotional of Bible-inspired poetry contains some of the most eloquent, inspiring, and profound poetry ever written. Readers will glean understanding, wisdom, and inspiration for life's struggles and victories. But most of all, they will learn more about their Savior and be inspired to devote their lives to him wholeheartedly. Includes indexes.
This series of essays provides thumbnail biographies of key figures in Christianity's last thousand years. The entries provide basic information about the person's life, development, era and ideas. The towering historical figures include mystics, reformers, theologians and church leaders.
Poetry. Religion & Sprituality. Edited by Todd Swift, Fr. Oliver Brennan, Kelly Davio and Cate Myddleton-Evans. This major anthology, the first of its kind, gathers work from renowned contemporary poets from America, Britain, and the world. Representative of poets from a wide variety of faiths as well as agnostics and atheists&8212;and introduced by renowned religious scholar Professor Ewan Fernie, this volume includes work by Andrew Motion, Rowan Williams, Ian Duhig, Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Charles Bernstein, and over 200 others."
In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.
In the midst of the hurt and the mundane, the questions and the not yets, you can forget just how far you have come. This illustrated collection of poetry and essays invites you to reclaim moments of brokenness, division, and pain and re-envision them as experiences of reconciliation, unity, and hope. Popular Instagram poet and bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols weaves together personal reflections through her signature poems, reflecting on the moments that shaped her. She invites you to: Awaken your heart and recognize how your own story has made you who you are today Enter into a deeper understanding of pressing on and pressing in, of transformation and surrender Discover meaning in the losses and embrace anticipation for the splendor ahead Become who you are in the moment you hold right now How Far You Have Come is an excellent gift for college and high school graduations, celebrations and anniversaries, life transitions, and birthdays or simply a gift for yourself. Follow Morgan on Instagram @morganharpernicols (along with her millions of followers), and look for more beautiful, thought-provoking poetry in her other collections: All Along You Were Blooming You Are Only Just Beginning
Poetry. Jewish Studies. Philip Terman's latest poetry collection, THIS CRAZY DEVOTION, begins appropriately enough with "Tormented Meshuggenehs," "the crazy sages... / who dervished across the hayfields / and paused to yawp a parable to the cows about the seven beggars..." This passage announces much about the poetry that follows: that its craziness indeed is of the order of devotion in the spiritual sense, rooted in Judaism; and also that it often takes place in bucolic surroundings, rooted in the land. And why is this a little surprising, this conjunction of Jewish life and rural setting? For Terman they are seamless and sacred, and by portraying his Jewishness as woven through a life and landscape familiar to many (non-Jewish) readers, he dispels stereotypes and creates a community of mutual recognition and understanding. That would be virtue enough to applaud this collection, but it offers many other pleasures. "I am talking about this world, there is no other," he declares in the long and lovely meditative "Garden Chronicle" that forms the final section of the book. Such a world it is, full of all of the things to which he is crazily devoted, all of the things he writes about with such acuity and tenderness in these poems: heritage and faith, social justice, poetry, and even (in the title poem) almost meeting Bob Dylan--but foremost, his family and nature, both of which sustain him. He communes with ancestors, a grandfather he was too young to remember, who must have sung to him in Yiddish (and who, he supposes, just might have posed for Chagall). He imagines the radio interview his father might have given, replete with Borscht Belt humor, and recalls going for bagels with "the schlemiel... / who dated your sister-in-law / after your brother died." He devotes the second section, "Of Longing and Chutzpah," to memories of his mother, and in one of the most humorous and poignant moments recalls how in childhood his mother cut his hair to save money, an act Terman likens to "sculpting" him into all the things she might have wished him to be, "the boy she wants to be a mensch." (Based on the accounting he gives here, she succeeded. She also carved out a considerable poet.) Most of all, he writes of "The love of the long married," of children "at the kitchen table / doing homework," waiting on a school bus which arrives bearing all the hopes and happiness in the world. He gives the last word to the daughter whose question "After Later?" signifies "no set time, farther than the horizon, / on top of the sky, around the bend, outside this moment we're in" when, perhaps "all those things they said would happen / must surely have occurred." Such a lovely description of faith, so worthy of devotion.
