A World Ablaze: Reflections on Our Summer Theme In her famous epistolary novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s protagonist John Ames writes in his Pentecost sermon that ‘The Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation, and it turns to radiance—for a…
Hayyim Nachman Bialik’s ‘Be-‘ir haharegah‘ (‘In the City of Slaughter’) remains one of the most powerful literary responses to the Kishinev Pogrom. Bialik, a celebrated Jewish poet, penned it after visiting the Russian city where a mob of two thousand…
When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives…
Are not these people, who are speaking in various tongues, from Galilee? How is it that each of us hears them speaking in the language to which we were born? Iraqis, Shirvanis, Turanians, Egyptians, inhabitants of Diyarbekir, Africans, Anatolians, Arabs—each of us understands them praising God in our own language.1 This…
In traditional Christian iconography, Pentecost is associated with the image of tongues of flames, fire, or even doves, which signify the Holy Spirit in Christian scriptures and interpretations. It is quite rare to find a visual portrayal that depicts this…
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives…
‘I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable’ could almost belong to a liturgy of Pentecost or Confirmation, yet it does not. It is Ilúvatar commanding the Ainur to sing in ‘Ainulindalë’, the creation story that opens Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.…
The following reflections explore a few ways in which my discipline as a violinist on gut-strung period instruments facilitates meditation on the Pentecost imagery of rushing wind and flame, connoting movement and emanation, respectively. This imagery represents a God who,…
In this essay, Josh Larsen reflects on the ecological, theological, and eschatological dimensions of one of Italy’s most famous buildings, asking how it is both a harbinger and partial or penultimate sign of the world to come, a world made…