Sometimes our articles are about the ordinary. I enjoy these pieces, whether they focus on the week-in, week-out texture of life in a congregation or one columnist’s religious zeal for the game of basketball. But other times our writers reflect on the trailblazers and legends of theology, ministry, art, or activism. I also tend to enjoy these odes (or criticisms).
This week we have some of the big-name reflections. After the recent death of theologian Jürgen Moltmann, Nancy Bedford (who was one of his doctoral students in the 1990s) reflects on her decades of life-giving friendship with him. Alejandra Oliva describes not a significant person but a significant place: Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s beautiful modernist cathedral-in-progress. And Philip Jenkins walks us through a profound sequence of poems, Horae Canonicae, from one of his own heroes of the faith, poet W. H. Auden.
“The poem ‘Vespers’ offers a theme long cherished by Auden, which is the conflict between the utopian and the arcadian—between one who looks forward to an idealized future and another who is wholly devoted to a primeval past, to Eden.”
