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An interview with
Peter Augustine
Lawler, professor
and member of the
President's Council
on Bioethics, about
his new book,
Homeless and at
Home in America.
Click here.
Peter Augustine
Lawler, professor
and member of the
President's Council
on Bioethics, about
his new book,
Homeless and at
Home in America.
Click here.
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Three poems from
the new chapbook
by D.S. Martin. The
poems address his
grandparents' time as
missionaries in
China. Click here.
the new chapbook
by D.S. Martin. The
poems address his
grandparents' time as
missionaries in
China. Click here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rhett Iseman Trull,
poet and editor of
Cave Wall, shares a
poem in which a
teenage girl begins
to see miracles in
ordinary things.
Read "Counting
Miracles at the State
Asylum."
poet and editor of
Cave Wall, shares a
poem in which a
teenage girl begins
to see miracles in
ordinary things.
Read "Counting
Miracles at the State
Asylum."
An interview with
British author Lesley
Chamberlain, whose
acclaimed books on
Russian intellectual
history were recently
published in the U.S.
British author Lesley
Chamberlain, whose
acclaimed books on
Russian intellectual
history were recently
published in the U.S.
A detail from "The
Sun Casts Fire on
the Earth" by
Andrew Burch. Get
the full view of "The
Sun Casts Fire on
the Earth."
Sun Casts Fire on
the Earth" by
Andrew Burch. Get
the full view of "The
Sun Casts Fire on
the Earth."
Byron Harris, a
former assignment
editor at CNN who
studied under Old
Testament scholar
Walter Brueggeman,
argues for the
necessity of the
Creeds in our time.
former assignment
editor at CNN who
studied under Old
Testament scholar
Walter Brueggeman,
argues for the
necessity of the
Creeds in our time.
Peter Reinhart,
author and baking
expert, offers his
thoughts on the
connection between
bread baking and the
mystical dimension
of life.
author and baking
expert, offers his
thoughts on the
connection between
bread baking and the
mystical dimension
of life.
Colin Foote Burch
explains how
historical continuity,
represented in
liturgies and creeds,
has implications for
the entire culture.
explains how
historical continuity,
represented in
liturgies and creeds,
has implications for
the entire culture.
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In 1955, Ruth Pitter became the first woman
to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
The English poet (and personal friend of C.S. Lewis) also
won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937 for A
Trophy of Arms and the William E. Heinneman Award in
1954 for The Ermine. She was admired by W.B. Yeats
and members of the Inklings.
Don W. King recently completed Hunting the Unicorn: A
Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter (Kent State University
Press), the first work of its kind on Pitter and her poetry.
The book has just been released.
King is Professor of English at Montreat College in
Montreat, N.C., and editor of Christian Scholar’s Review.
He is author of C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His
Poetic Impulse. LiturgicalCredo recently interviewed King
about Pitter and the story behind Hunting the Unicorn.
to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
The English poet (and personal friend of C.S. Lewis) also
won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937 for A
Trophy of Arms and the William E. Heinneman Award in
1954 for The Ermine. She was admired by W.B. Yeats
and members of the Inklings.
Don W. King recently completed Hunting the Unicorn: A
Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter (Kent State University
Press), the first work of its kind on Pitter and her poetry.
The book has just been released.
King is Professor of English at Montreat College in
Montreat, N.C., and editor of Christian Scholar’s Review.
He is author of C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His
Poetic Impulse. LiturgicalCredo recently interviewed King
about Pitter and the story behind Hunting the Unicorn.
| Hunting the Unicorn: An Interview with Don W. King |
What is the story of how, where and when you came
across Ruth Pitter, and was it in your research?
When I was working on the Lewis book I came across
references to correspondence between Pitter and Lewis, and
I didn’t really know Pitter before then. What I discovered
was that she was a well-known poet, and since Lewis was a
wannabe poet, after he was introduced to her he began to
write her and send her his own poetry, asking for her to
critique his poetry.
More importantly, after I made that discovery, then I found
out that she had become so taken with the end of Lewis’
book Perelandra that she wrote him and asked if he minded if
she turned the end of Perelandra into verse, so she would
remember it. And he wrote her back and said something like,
“I don’t know why you want to waste your poetry on my
prose, but if that’s what you want to do, it’s fine with me.”
That was important for my book on Lewis’ poetry because
the main argument I make in that book is that Lewis’ best
poetry is in his prose. So for Pitter to have asked if she can
take his prose, and turn it into poetry, supported the thesis
of the book. I made reference to this – that she had turned
the end of the book into poetry, so that set me off on a
search for about two years trying to find notebooks where
she had actually done that.
And I could give you a long version of this, but the short
version is that I was at the Bodleian [Library at the
University of Oxford] one summer, about to finish up my
research, and I had finally gotten access to Pitter’s papers,
and in the last notebook – I think it was in the last notebook
in the next to the last box of her material I was looking in – I
found the transcriptions. That was exciting – only a
researcher would get excited about that kind of stuff. So it
really helped my book on Lewis’ poetry and about the same
time my main contact at the Bodleian had told me that
somebody needed to write a book on Pitter, that she was
really an important Twentieth Century British poet, and no
one had really done any work on it. And so I made a mental
note when I finished my book on C.S. Lewis’ poetry that I
would go to work on Pitter, so that’s how all that came to be.
What kind of relationship did she have with some of the
other Inklings?
Well, Pitter did not have a university education. She came to
maturity during World War One and actually had matriculated
at London University but when the war came basically she
had to drop out, and she took a job in the Foreign Office.
So she didn’t have the background that Lewis and his
friends, most of the other Inklings, would have had – she
didn’t have a university education.
Her first contact with one of the Inklings was with Lord David
Cecil, who came across her poetry and was quite moved by
it, and basically wrote her fan letters. He was, by the way, a
professor of literature at one of the Oxford colleges, so you
can imagine how that must have made her feel – “Here’s an
academic writing me and telling me how much he enjoys my
poetry.”
Pitter and Cecil began corresponding but it was through
another common friend in the mid 1940s that Lewis came
across Pitter’s poetry, and basically he did the same thing
that David Cecil had done; he communicated to this friend
that he thought she was a quite good poet. That
emboldened Pitter to ask if she could come visit Lewis in
Oxford. She had really been impressed during World War Two
listening to Lewis’ radio broadcasts that eventually became
Mere Christianity. And in many ways – she says in many
letters – that her own movement toward Christianity was a
direct result of having heard Lewis on the radio.
So by the time she writes him in the mid 1940s – I think it
was 1946, their first letter – she is nearing faith in Christ but
she’s not quite there. But she writes to Lewis and says can
she come to Magdalen College, and he invites her up to have
lunch in his rooms. And that began the relationship. It was
initially, primarily, about poetry – I mean, that’s what they
had in common, their interest in poetry. And as I said earlier,
he was the wannabe poet and she was the established well-
known poet. He shared her view of poetry, what poetry
should do, the kind of poetry they both liked. In a way it was
only natural, once he befriended her, that they would begin
this correspondence.
You talked about the surprise of running across the
Perelandra transcripts. Once you started digging into
Pitter for the sake of doing a book on her, were there
new surprises waiting for you?
I think one of the surprises was that she wasn’t university
educated. She was an artisan. She worked hard all of her
life, basically doing ornamental painting on furniture. She and
a friend of hers . . . eventually set up a business – this was
after they learned the trade…and eventually they decided to
set up their own business. From the 1930s they had quite a
successful business doing this, sending their goods all over
the British Empire. World War Two put a squash on that as it
did on many things. But I think that was the first thing that
surprised me, that she wasn’t an academic. She was a hard-
working woman who happened to have the gifts of
poetry.
The second thing that surprised me was that her first poem
was published when she was about nine years old. Her father
had been friends with a man whose name was A.R. Orage,
who was well-known at the beginning of the 19th Century as
the editor of a socialist newspaper, and through that
contact, Pitter had a lot of her poetry published. I think her
first poem was published about 1911. So from 1911 through
the early 1920s she had a lot of poetry published in that
periodical, called The New Age. It wasn’t particularly good
poetry as she herself later admitted but then again you can
imagine the good of the encouragement she must have had,
to have some of her poetry published at such a young age.
This was in a periodical where poetry by Ezra Pound
appeared, and Kathryn Mansfield, so some of these people
who were published, who she was published alongside of,
were quite significant poets. There were a lot of other bad
poets published in the same thing, but, you know, interesting
that she made some early contacts like that.
She was befriended at a number of times by some rather
significant literary luminaries of the time, and they helped to
push her poetry forward. Maybe another thing that surprised
me is that – and a reason I like her too – she was pretty self-
effacing, and didn’t try to do much to try to push her name
and her poetry into the forefront. It was just like she wrote
poetry because she loved it, and of course she would like
people to be interested in it. You know, the whole P.R. thing
was just something that was anathema to her. It
embarrassed her to see some of her friends who spent all
their time trying to get their name out in public. At the same
time, she was fortunate to have Orage and Hillaire Belloc –
Belloc was a pretty important writer and member of
Parliament [and] through the 1920s he took Pitter under his
wing, and David Cecil did. She was fortunate to have some
people who saw the merit of her poetry and were able to
help her get some of that poetry published.
You said that one of the reasons you liked her was that
she was not a real big self-promoter. Talk about what
you like about her work itself, about her actual poems.
Yeah, I’d be glad to do that. When you start a project like
this it’s important to like the person you’re writing about. I
think the main thing I appreciate about Pitter’s poetry – and
I think it’s what many of her readers do appreciate – is that
she wasn’t trendy, she wasn’t avante garde, and most of all
her poetry is not impenetrable. In other words, her poetry is
pretty accessible. She was writing at a time in which sort of
modernist tradition – and that would be represented by
poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden – were in
many ways writing a new kind of poetry that, at least for the
average reader, that poetry seemed impenetrable, seemed
needlessly ambiguous, it seemed quite frankly inaccessible….I
wouldn’t say that her poetry is easy, it’s not easy, but it’s
accessible, in part because her most common theme is
reflections on the human condition: What does it mean to be
a human being? What does it mean to access nature, which
is a very important theme in her work.
To access nature?
Yes, to appreciate nature, to commune with nature, to draw
strength out of nature settings. She was a gardener all her
life and…probably, if she could have afforded it, would have
earned her living as a gardener as opposed to an artisan.
So I think the main thing is that her poetry is accessible to
most readers. I think, by the way, that’s why Lewis liked her,
because he was dead-set against the poetry represented by
Eliot and Auden. Their kindred spirit was their enjoyment of
poetry. And the kind of poets that were associated with
Pitter – as opposed to those modernist poets I just
mentioned – would have been people more like Thomas
Hardy, A.E. Houseman, William Butler Yeats, and Philip Larkin.
Those are the kinds of poets that Pitter were in the line of.
Again, those aren’t easy poets, but they’re accessible poets.
You’re not left scratching your head after every single poem,
which is what happens a lot of times to non-academic
readers, and even academic readers of the poetry of Eliot,
Pound, and Auden, at times. Now, I do think that Eliot,
Auden, and Pound are great poets, so I don’t necessarily
share that view – Pitter had a pretty negative view of those
poets, but I understand where she was coming from….She
saw her roots back in the poetry of Shakespeare, and Keats,
and Shelley, and Tennyson, sort of the greats of the English
tradition.
You’ve said a lot there to commend her. You probably
already answered my question about explaining her
work to people today who read poetry.
You know, I think that her poetry is very appealing. By the
way… I have a Web site on Pitter, and I get contacted
monthly by people who like Pitter’s poetry, and almost
always the reason why they like Pitter’s poetry is because
they can understand it, and it’s accessible to them, and she
writes about things that they can connect to…. You can just
type in your browser The Ruth Pitter Project, and it will take
you to that. The Web site is a summary of the research I’ve
been doing and so forth. And I just found out today that
there is a link to my book that’s coming out with Kent State
University Press. I just found it today, I was just kind of
fooling around with something else, and came across it.
Are there any of her books still in print?
Yes, her collected poems are still in print, and they are
available directly from the publisher. It’s a British publisher,
and it is www.enitharmon.co.uk. ….So her collected poems
are available, and in print, and I hope…what my book does is
cause people to go out and buy her poetry. She published, in
total, 17 volumes of new and collected verse….Her first
volume of poetry, First Poems, was published in 1920, and
her last volume of poetry… was titled Heaven to Find, 1987.
Do you have a solid release day for Hunting the Unicorn?
I keep trying to get the publisher to give me one, but all
they are saying now is May. Actually I hope it will be in April,
but they’re saying May.
What is the origin of the title?
It comes from a radio broadcast that Pitter gave. She
became pretty popular on BBC radio. She gave a number of
talks and one of her radio broadcasts was originally entitled
“We Cannot Take Less” … but when it aired on BBC, it was
under Pitter’s title, “Hunting the Unicorn.”
Let me just read you a little excerpt of it; that’s probably the
best way to describe to you where the title came from. So in
this radio broadcast she says:
“I was sitting in front of a cottage door one day in spring
long ago, a few bushes and flowers round me, bird gathering
nesting material, trees of the forest at a little distance. A
poor place, nothing glamorous about it. And suddenly,
everything assumed a different aspect, its true aspect. For a
moment it seemed to me that truth appeared in its
overwhelming splendor. The secret was out, the explanation
given, something that had seemed like total freedom, total
power, total bliss – good with no bad as its opposite, an
absolute that had no opposite. This thing, so unlike our
feeble nature, had suddenly cut across one’s life and
vanished. What is this thing? Is it, could it be, after all, a
hint of something more real than this life? A message from
reality, perhaps a particle of reality itself? If so, no wonder
we hunt it so unceasingly, and never stop desiring it and
pining for it.”
Now, I don’t know how well you know Lewis, but if you know
what Lewis has to say about his own search for joy, what I
just read to you is very, very similar to what Lewis has to
say about his own pursuit of joy. So “hunting the unicorn”
becomes a metaphor for hunting for that which we all long
for, but we can’t quite realize here as part of our earthly
experience. It’s what we yearn for, it’s what we pine for, it’s
what we long for, and every once and a while we get a little
glimpse of it here on earth. So I think Pitter’s poetry takes us
to hidden places, to the secret things of life, to things just
beyond the material, maybe to the very meaning of
life.
Visit The Ruth Pitter Project online.
Return to the top of the page.
across Ruth Pitter, and was it in your research?
When I was working on the Lewis book I came across
references to correspondence between Pitter and Lewis, and
I didn’t really know Pitter before then. What I discovered
was that she was a well-known poet, and since Lewis was a
wannabe poet, after he was introduced to her he began to
write her and send her his own poetry, asking for her to
critique his poetry.
More importantly, after I made that discovery, then I found
out that she had become so taken with the end of Lewis’
book Perelandra that she wrote him and asked if he minded if
she turned the end of Perelandra into verse, so she would
remember it. And he wrote her back and said something like,
“I don’t know why you want to waste your poetry on my
prose, but if that’s what you want to do, it’s fine with me.”
That was important for my book on Lewis’ poetry because
the main argument I make in that book is that Lewis’ best
poetry is in his prose. So for Pitter to have asked if she can
take his prose, and turn it into poetry, supported the thesis
of the book. I made reference to this – that she had turned
the end of the book into poetry, so that set me off on a
search for about two years trying to find notebooks where
she had actually done that.
And I could give you a long version of this, but the short
version is that I was at the Bodleian [Library at the
University of Oxford] one summer, about to finish up my
research, and I had finally gotten access to Pitter’s papers,
and in the last notebook – I think it was in the last notebook
in the next to the last box of her material I was looking in – I
found the transcriptions. That was exciting – only a
researcher would get excited about that kind of stuff. So it
really helped my book on Lewis’ poetry and about the same
time my main contact at the Bodleian had told me that
somebody needed to write a book on Pitter, that she was
really an important Twentieth Century British poet, and no
one had really done any work on it. And so I made a mental
note when I finished my book on C.S. Lewis’ poetry that I
would go to work on Pitter, so that’s how all that came to be.
What kind of relationship did she have with some of the
other Inklings?
Well, Pitter did not have a university education. She came to
maturity during World War One and actually had matriculated
at London University but when the war came basically she
had to drop out, and she took a job in the Foreign Office.
So she didn’t have the background that Lewis and his
friends, most of the other Inklings, would have had – she
didn’t have a university education.
Her first contact with one of the Inklings was with Lord David
Cecil, who came across her poetry and was quite moved by
it, and basically wrote her fan letters. He was, by the way, a
professor of literature at one of the Oxford colleges, so you
can imagine how that must have made her feel – “Here’s an
academic writing me and telling me how much he enjoys my
poetry.”
Pitter and Cecil began corresponding but it was through
another common friend in the mid 1940s that Lewis came
across Pitter’s poetry, and basically he did the same thing
that David Cecil had done; he communicated to this friend
that he thought she was a quite good poet. That
emboldened Pitter to ask if she could come visit Lewis in
Oxford. She had really been impressed during World War Two
listening to Lewis’ radio broadcasts that eventually became
Mere Christianity. And in many ways – she says in many
letters – that her own movement toward Christianity was a
direct result of having heard Lewis on the radio.
So by the time she writes him in the mid 1940s – I think it
was 1946, their first letter – she is nearing faith in Christ but
she’s not quite there. But she writes to Lewis and says can
she come to Magdalen College, and he invites her up to have
lunch in his rooms. And that began the relationship. It was
initially, primarily, about poetry – I mean, that’s what they
had in common, their interest in poetry. And as I said earlier,
he was the wannabe poet and she was the established well-
known poet. He shared her view of poetry, what poetry
should do, the kind of poetry they both liked. In a way it was
only natural, once he befriended her, that they would begin
this correspondence.
You talked about the surprise of running across the
Perelandra transcripts. Once you started digging into
Pitter for the sake of doing a book on her, were there
new surprises waiting for you?
I think one of the surprises was that she wasn’t university
educated. She was an artisan. She worked hard all of her
life, basically doing ornamental painting on furniture. She and
a friend of hers . . . eventually set up a business – this was
after they learned the trade…and eventually they decided to
set up their own business. From the 1930s they had quite a
successful business doing this, sending their goods all over
the British Empire. World War Two put a squash on that as it
did on many things. But I think that was the first thing that
surprised me, that she wasn’t an academic. She was a hard-
working woman who happened to have the gifts of
poetry.
The second thing that surprised me was that her first poem
was published when she was about nine years old. Her father
had been friends with a man whose name was A.R. Orage,
who was well-known at the beginning of the 19th Century as
the editor of a socialist newspaper, and through that
contact, Pitter had a lot of her poetry published. I think her
first poem was published about 1911. So from 1911 through
the early 1920s she had a lot of poetry published in that
periodical, called The New Age. It wasn’t particularly good
poetry as she herself later admitted but then again you can
imagine the good of the encouragement she must have had,
to have some of her poetry published at such a young age.
This was in a periodical where poetry by Ezra Pound
appeared, and Kathryn Mansfield, so some of these people
who were published, who she was published alongside of,
were quite significant poets. There were a lot of other bad
poets published in the same thing, but, you know, interesting
that she made some early contacts like that.
She was befriended at a number of times by some rather
significant literary luminaries of the time, and they helped to
push her poetry forward. Maybe another thing that surprised
me is that – and a reason I like her too – she was pretty self-
effacing, and didn’t try to do much to try to push her name
and her poetry into the forefront. It was just like she wrote
poetry because she loved it, and of course she would like
people to be interested in it. You know, the whole P.R. thing
was just something that was anathema to her. It
embarrassed her to see some of her friends who spent all
their time trying to get their name out in public. At the same
time, she was fortunate to have Orage and Hillaire Belloc –
Belloc was a pretty important writer and member of
Parliament [and] through the 1920s he took Pitter under his
wing, and David Cecil did. She was fortunate to have some
people who saw the merit of her poetry and were able to
help her get some of that poetry published.
You said that one of the reasons you liked her was that
she was not a real big self-promoter. Talk about what
you like about her work itself, about her actual poems.
Yeah, I’d be glad to do that. When you start a project like
this it’s important to like the person you’re writing about. I
think the main thing I appreciate about Pitter’s poetry – and
I think it’s what many of her readers do appreciate – is that
she wasn’t trendy, she wasn’t avante garde, and most of all
her poetry is not impenetrable. In other words, her poetry is
pretty accessible. She was writing at a time in which sort of
modernist tradition – and that would be represented by
poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden – were in
many ways writing a new kind of poetry that, at least for the
average reader, that poetry seemed impenetrable, seemed
needlessly ambiguous, it seemed quite frankly inaccessible….I
wouldn’t say that her poetry is easy, it’s not easy, but it’s
accessible, in part because her most common theme is
reflections on the human condition: What does it mean to be
a human being? What does it mean to access nature, which
is a very important theme in her work.
To access nature?
Yes, to appreciate nature, to commune with nature, to draw
strength out of nature settings. She was a gardener all her
life and…probably, if she could have afforded it, would have
earned her living as a gardener as opposed to an artisan.
So I think the main thing is that her poetry is accessible to
most readers. I think, by the way, that’s why Lewis liked her,
because he was dead-set against the poetry represented by
Eliot and Auden. Their kindred spirit was their enjoyment of
poetry. And the kind of poets that were associated with
Pitter – as opposed to those modernist poets I just
mentioned – would have been people more like Thomas
Hardy, A.E. Houseman, William Butler Yeats, and Philip Larkin.
Those are the kinds of poets that Pitter were in the line of.
Again, those aren’t easy poets, but they’re accessible poets.
You’re not left scratching your head after every single poem,
which is what happens a lot of times to non-academic
readers, and even academic readers of the poetry of Eliot,
Pound, and Auden, at times. Now, I do think that Eliot,
Auden, and Pound are great poets, so I don’t necessarily
share that view – Pitter had a pretty negative view of those
poets, but I understand where she was coming from….She
saw her roots back in the poetry of Shakespeare, and Keats,
and Shelley, and Tennyson, sort of the greats of the English
tradition.
You’ve said a lot there to commend her. You probably
already answered my question about explaining her
work to people today who read poetry.
You know, I think that her poetry is very appealing. By the
way… I have a Web site on Pitter, and I get contacted
monthly by people who like Pitter’s poetry, and almost
always the reason why they like Pitter’s poetry is because
they can understand it, and it’s accessible to them, and she
writes about things that they can connect to…. You can just
type in your browser The Ruth Pitter Project, and it will take
you to that. The Web site is a summary of the research I’ve
been doing and so forth. And I just found out today that
there is a link to my book that’s coming out with Kent State
University Press. I just found it today, I was just kind of
fooling around with something else, and came across it.
Are there any of her books still in print?
Yes, her collected poems are still in print, and they are
available directly from the publisher. It’s a British publisher,
and it is www.enitharmon.co.uk. ….So her collected poems
are available, and in print, and I hope…what my book does is
cause people to go out and buy her poetry. She published, in
total, 17 volumes of new and collected verse….Her first
volume of poetry, First Poems, was published in 1920, and
her last volume of poetry… was titled Heaven to Find, 1987.
Do you have a solid release day for Hunting the Unicorn?
I keep trying to get the publisher to give me one, but all
they are saying now is May. Actually I hope it will be in April,
but they’re saying May.
What is the origin of the title?
It comes from a radio broadcast that Pitter gave. She
became pretty popular on BBC radio. She gave a number of
talks and one of her radio broadcasts was originally entitled
“We Cannot Take Less” … but when it aired on BBC, it was
under Pitter’s title, “Hunting the Unicorn.”
Let me just read you a little excerpt of it; that’s probably the
best way to describe to you where the title came from. So in
this radio broadcast she says:
“I was sitting in front of a cottage door one day in spring
long ago, a few bushes and flowers round me, bird gathering
nesting material, trees of the forest at a little distance. A
poor place, nothing glamorous about it. And suddenly,
everything assumed a different aspect, its true aspect. For a
moment it seemed to me that truth appeared in its
overwhelming splendor. The secret was out, the explanation
given, something that had seemed like total freedom, total
power, total bliss – good with no bad as its opposite, an
absolute that had no opposite. This thing, so unlike our
feeble nature, had suddenly cut across one’s life and
vanished. What is this thing? Is it, could it be, after all, a
hint of something more real than this life? A message from
reality, perhaps a particle of reality itself? If so, no wonder
we hunt it so unceasingly, and never stop desiring it and
pining for it.”
Now, I don’t know how well you know Lewis, but if you know
what Lewis has to say about his own search for joy, what I
just read to you is very, very similar to what Lewis has to
say about his own pursuit of joy. So “hunting the unicorn”
becomes a metaphor for hunting for that which we all long
for, but we can’t quite realize here as part of our earthly
experience. It’s what we yearn for, it’s what we pine for, it’s
what we long for, and every once and a while we get a little
glimpse of it here on earth. So I think Pitter’s poetry takes us
to hidden places, to the secret things of life, to things just
beyond the material, maybe to the very meaning of
life.
Visit The Ruth Pitter Project online.
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| intersections unlikely meetings of religion & culture |
Pete Gall, whose book
My Beautiful Idol was
recently published by
Zondervan, explains
the damage done by
outcome-based
Christianity, and how
a relational view of
grace can be a remedy.
My Beautiful Idol was
recently published by
Zondervan, explains
the damage done by
outcome-based
Christianity, and how
a relational view of
grace can be a remedy.
A review of Praying
With Beads: Daily
Prayers for the
Christian Year by
Nan Lewis Doerr &
Virginia Stem Owens.
With Beads: Daily
Prayers for the
Christian Year by
Nan Lewis Doerr &
Virginia Stem Owens.
NEW: We interview
author & professor
Margaret Graver
about the Stoics, their
view of the emotions,
and the value of their
philosophy today.
author & professor
Margaret Graver
about the Stoics, their
view of the emotions,
and the value of their
philosophy today.
Aimee Mann, a brilliant singer-songwriter,
offers several loaded lines in the song
"Freeway," from her new album, Smilers.
Here are just two:
offers several loaded lines in the song
"Freeway," from her new album, Smilers.
Here are just two:
| You found yourself a prophet but you left him on the boardwalk Another chocolate Eastern bunny hollowed out by your talk |
We don't pretend to be master
interpreters of lyrics, but it was easy
to imagine a boardwalk as a place for
pushy evangelism, the Easter bunny as
a reference to Christianity, and the
hollowing-out as something that might
have been accomplished through
speech that was hateful or hypocritical.
Even if we're completely off-base, it's
an excellent song, lyrically as well as
instrumentally. We first heard
"Freeway" on a Paste magazine sampler.
Now we're pinching pennies to buy the
whole album.
interpreters of lyrics, but it was easy
to imagine a boardwalk as a place for
pushy evangelism, the Easter bunny as
a reference to Christianity, and the
hollowing-out as something that might
have been accomplished through
speech that was hateful or hypocritical.
Even if we're completely off-base, it's
an excellent song, lyrically as well as
instrumentally. We first heard
"Freeway" on a Paste magazine sampler.
Now we're pinching pennies to buy the
whole album.
