All afternoon I have been watching a pair of hummingbirds play about our porch. They live somewhere nearby, though I haven’t found their nest. They are attracted to our hummingbird feeder, which we keep full of sugar water.
Articles with 2005
Photo by alan braeley on Unsplash
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
The future of Catholicism?
So now we wait for a new Supreme Pontiff. John Paul II will be hard to top.
Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash
On the virtue of gray
There is no bright side to the story of Terri Schiavo, nor would it have been my place to suggest to her loved ones an appropriate course of action.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
In praise of the Enlightenment
In an essay “Why Religion,” the poet Czesław Miłosz tells us that he lived at a time when human imagination was dramatically changing. Heaven and Hell disappeared, he says, belief in an afterlife was weakened, and the borderline between humans and animals was blurred by the theory of evolution.
"The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel" by Ditlev Blunck (1830)
Ezekiel’s vision
As I ease into retirement, I have taken to spending part of each year on a quiet little island in the Caribbean. I came here looking for winter warmth, of course, but also for dark skies. I am a stargazer by lifelong habit, and my primary home near a major American city is awash in artificial light.
The Orion nebula • NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Public Domain)
A peephole to the gods?
Under truly dark skies our ancestors saw the middle “star” of Orion’s sword as a tiny smudge of light. The Englishman William Derham, who wrote on cosmology in the early 18th century, believed the glow in Orion was a opening in the celestial sphere through which we observe the radiance of God.
Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash
On death and beauty
Few poems of the previous century have attracted more discussion than Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.”
Detail of the sculpture "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" by Canova • Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont (CC BY 4.0)
The door of the soul
Mouths. I want to write about mouths. These lips I caress with my fingertip. These teeth I bare. This tongue, curled and soft like a bear in its den. This throat, strung with the instruments of speech.
Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash
Can a skeptic pray?
When two pagan Irish princesses, daughters of King Laoghaire, asked Patrick about his God, he is said to have answered: “Our God is the God of all things, the God of the sky and earth, the God of sea and stream, the God of sun and moon, the God of the great high mountains and the deep glens, the God of heaven, in heaven and under heaven.”
Photo by Feroze Omardeen (CC BY 2.0)
Rhapsody in C major
Hummingbirds and bananaquits at the bird feeders. Can’t help but smile. Can’t help but feel a thrill. Who can be glum in the face of so much animation — so much of what is — packed up in those tiny bodies, abuzz with life, turning sugar into energy.