We are made of ink and into ink
we shall perish. Our history survives
in fire soot and boneblack pigment.
Carbon fingerprints tell our telling
and dust writes to dust
as we make our voices heard
on papyrus, vellum, paper.
Ink gyves our identities in gall
and gum. Ink gives us life
then consigns to death.
Church registries say that
once we were here.
But even as our names fade in ink,
they will be read in the Lamb’s book
without fear of blot or blur.
Those starlings,
that crowd of black wings
patterning the noon sky,
flow along a highway invisible,
unknown to us, we without
wings, stiff, anchored,
eyes on the rutted road beneath our feet.
How to look up. To risk
looking up, perhaps to lose
our footing in the enchantment of
cloud splendor, the heaven-
sent stabs of sunlight, the arrival
of rain on our dry fields,
our yearning hearts.
Millions of Christians worship like the Orthodox but are aligned with Rome. Andy Warhol was one of them.
In Yehiel Poupko’s poems, Jewish belief in God groans under the burden of divine silence.
Brendan Johnson, a medical student, podcast host, and graduate of the theology, medicine, and culture fellowship at Duke Divinity School, brings the ordinary materials of his woodcuts—ink, wood, chisels—in conversation with the wondrous acts of healing they depict. His work focuses on ethics and just care. “Our suffering patients confront us, point blank, with the ways in which we all fail to love one another well,” Johnson writes in an article for the Hastings Center.
What if the Second Coming
has already come,
and those fearful faces,
expecting judgment to rain down
from the tormenting skies
(lifting the raptured
and leaving the rest of us behind),
had it all wrong?
Maya Angelou // Haji Chilonga’s On Red Dress
It’s those familiar scenes
beyond the hollowed tomb—
the sudden surprise meeting
with the gardener who knows my name—
that sunset sabbath journey,
approaching stranger, wayside inn,
the evening meal, the certain way
the bread was broken—
the breakfast on the shore at daybreak,
gentle invitation, driftwood fire,
crisp, fragrant fish on glowing coals,
the walk along the sand, those questions.
I can see myself among them
as they shared a meal, a word, a presence,
maybe even laughed together
Unmasking and slaying our Promethean desire for mastery
from Epistles to Eve