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In stores, my father would reach into his pocket with a big red
hand, offer to pay for his purchases with a fist full of beans,
explaining the economics of abundance: one seed makes one hundred.
I remember the confusion of the cashiers, our mortification.

In the old house he had a bean room snarled with vines, dried beans
in their pods, beans for the apocalypse, beans for the Great Tribulation,
beans for feasting and planting and surviving, beans for life and death.
Grow corn and beans, he said. Put no trust in mammon. Hope in resurrection.

This is true of failures in writing, in faith, in life itself.

“People asked, ‘Is it George Floyd or Jesus?’ My answer was yes.”

It is usually late at night when Michael C. Gibson creates his works of art. He works with purpose and exactness in a world of shimmering grays, as he says, to “push the limits of realism in the graphite medium” as well as to seek to “capture that which we cannot see: thoughts, feelings, emotions, the soul and spirit.” When the two meet, as in this visual document of Black lives, lost lives, resistance, and ancestors, what emerges is immediate, devastating, and demanding.

In Nancy Johnson’s debut novel, a family secret draws a successful Black woman home to small-town Indiana.

I know what you’ve heard:
Build on rock, so when rain
pours down, you will not fall.

I’m a prickly enigma.
I build my tin-green home
on this sand because we are friends.

Believe it or not,
my foundation is stable.
My rhizomes cement my footer

and multiply my kind all down the line.

My architecture’s ingenious:
my reedy, inrolled leaves store water
and catch the great lake’s wind.

I am a wonder,
and welcoming, sharing the wealth
atop this dune, inviting other colonies

Matt and Adam talk about the 2021 Academy Award Best Picture nominees. 

Dominican Republic

The yellow-crowned night heron
Plucks the land crab
Inching from its burrow,

Cracks its red shell
To pick with whetted beak
The shredded innards.

The heron’s plumed skull
Shaded gray and black
Seems rendered by Caravaggio.

How holy to be eaten by beauty,
Or to scuttle
Under a thistle to pinch

The green and blue
Iridescent beetle
And allow beauty to inhabit you.

Stanley Hauerwas says good theological writing makes the familiar strange.

The strange notion of rûaḥ in the Hebrew Scriptures shatters
taxonomies, leaving us to ask mistakenly, “Is rûaḥ wind? Breath?
Spirit? Or spirit?” In particular, rûaḥ causes tidy dichotomies to
splinter, neat categories to fragment.
                —Jack Levison, A Boundless God