Scott Cairns

Acceptable Words

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“Offers an important and wise appreciation of the keenly relational, essentially dialogic practice that is the writer's life. With these matters in mind, writers of any genre will be better equipped for that discipline, and for entering into and participating in the long conversation we call literature.”

Accompanied by Angels

Arts & Literature

“In the language of salt and sinew, grit and grace, Luci Shaw articulates into fresh apprehension the Word made flesh, the Holy One hallowing all things by His becoming one of them.”

Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Arts & Literature

“Poring over this collection, I find manifested a familiar equanimity, a deep bass note of joy upholding the heart despite the many and serial griefs and other displacements (both internal and external) that human life appears to require of us along the journey. I find—as I attend—that the speaker has previously attended with great devotion to the persons, places, and things that have accompanied both her journey and her many, many remarkable sojourns along the way. Because she has refused to squander her accumulated lessons, the reader is also mentored toward wisdom, grace, and peace.”

Angelicus

Arts & Literature

“In alternating moves—flights of fancy and sudden gravity—Martin offers a fine contemporary take regarding our surround of messengers.”

Blending Colors

Arts & Literature

“Blending Colors is a veritable potpourri of verses witnessing to the fascinations of a generous mind.”

Duress

Arts & Literature

“With formal elegance and visionary comprehension, the poems of Duress prove witness to the immensity occasioned in the small, and the particularity made manifest in the endless expanse before us.”

Four Birds of Noah’s Ark

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“By bringing back into view the curious Thomas Dekker and his practice of prayer, Robert Hudson has recovered and has made manifest for us a great treasure. Dekker’s prayer life is one duly understood as a path proceeding from grace to grace; the journey is as freeing of the soul as it is efficacious in enhancing the uncommon intimacy—the increasing unity—between the one who prays and the one who hears the prayer. May this book be blessed.”

Hillbilly Hymn

Fiction

“I admire Peter Biles’s deft storytelling—a well-crafted, compelling, and credible voice, and bearing always a profound moral wisdom at the core.”

In the House of My Pilgrimage

“Greeks of the Orthodox tradition speak of a man like Donald Sheehan as a κοσμοκαλόγερος—a monk in the world. Through a life of noetic prayer, he stands solidly in the world while apprehending the invisible reality of God’s nearness. Such persons become the intimate friends of God. You might say that they become prayer. With this book, Sheehan and his beloved Xenia show us how such lives occur, how far such lives reach.”

Let’s Call It Home

Arts & Literature

“Luke Harvey’s poetry reminds me of my younger and more compassionate self. His work is more cannily colloquial, more expansively gracious than my own. These are actual poems, shaped by a truly faithful heart and mind in search of truth. May it be blessed.”

New Tracks, Night Falling

Arts & Literature

“These are documents, anecdotes, testimonies of a mind alert to subtle textures, a mind that is eager, willing, confident that significance should be witnessed in every detail.”

Opening King David

Arts & Literature

“Davis is that rare artist who can deal with religious themes without concealing his humanity or feeling the need to protect his Lord. Indeed, the integration on display here is something to behold; no crevice of human feeling or experience goes unexplored - and while the language is beautiful, it's also unassuming and funny (and, thankfully, never pious), which is hard to do, especially when you're addressing themes as serious as the ones Davis is, e.g. death, faith, doubt, beauty, alienation, love, sex, etc. In other words, his work is very much in line with the psalms from which he's drawing inspiration. That is, if King David had a sense of humor… which he must have had?! Here is the sort of accessibility (and wisdom) that it takes years to hone, and I couldn't think of better summer reading. Even if you're not a "poetry person," take a chance - this is as close as we're going to get to an Mbird laureate." David Zahl Editor, Mockingbird blog www.mbird.com "Like a Rabbi opening the sacred text, then toiling further yet to open every word therein, Brad Davis has pored over both the scriptures and our common circumstance to prod, to raise our wits, that we might glimpse how every challenge, every adversity might be met with grace.”

Painstaker

Arts & Literature

“The elegantly parsed anecdotes, observations, and recollections comprising Painstaker manifest a keen and compelling desire to witness within the puzzlements of common life a pulse of consolation, an arc of purpose, the deep bass notes of hope and joy.”

Phases

Arts & Literature

“Mischa Willett has a music all his own, albeit a music informed by years of his attending to the inexhaustible songs that comprise both world poetry and sacred text. He plays, therefore, with received matter, and he employs surprising linguistic brilliance to compose oratoria that brighten the heart of his reader, even as they transpose the familiar, offering echoes of a prior song lovingly adapted to a new, an exhilarating voice.”

Second Bloom

Arts & Literature

“At the heart of these new poems is a longstanding determination to make the most of time, and of mind, and of the immediate surround—whether that immediacy is comprised of grief, or of joy, or of perplexity. The deep, bass note here is attend! The developing hunger is holiness.”

Shattered

History & Biography

“With steadfast candor, Arthur Boers comes to terms with his father’s difficult life and the perplexing dispositions shaped by that life. In so doing, Arthur attends to the complexities of father-and-son relationships and examines the complex inheritance of trauma and blessing that shapes many men’s adult lives. Shattered is finally a story of pilgrimage—a journey of healing, of forgiveness, and of the pilgrim’s clear-eyed and heart-opening pursuit of the Father who calls us to follow him.”

Six Doors to the Seventh Dimension

“With sequential collages of prose and image and subsequent prose, the collaborators have labored to perform the very argument of their book, which is the necessity of what Bonhoeffer has called 'life together.'”

Soon Done with the Crosses

Arts & Literature

“Combining great wisdom with generous learning, serious linguistic play, and uncommon formal accomplishment, Claude Wilkinson’s new collection awakens in me the possibility of poetry as necessary, well-considered speech and indispensable conversation that promises both communion and community. May it be blessed.”

Start with a Word

Arts & Literature

“With her profound summonings, Marilyn McEntyre recovers for many contemporary readers an ancient practice that is reminiscent of rabbinic attention to the dark sayings of Scripture, those compelling, curious, often-challenging passages that would nudge us into seeing more, would have us glimpse the inexhaustibility of the One in Whom we live and move and have our being, even the inexhaustibility of His Word.”

The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible

Arts & Literature

“Wangerin the poet has done what few Christians, few clergy, and few servants of the word ever accomplish: he has set aside our common penchant for easy consolation, favoring a strenuous pursuit of authenticity and truth, wielding as his only tool a tenacious faith that language--its echoing music, its provocative cadences, its taste on the tongue--will lead him into glimpsing otherwise unavailable knowledge.”