Listening to Silence
I arrived at the advanced screening for Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, in the worst possible frame of mind. For one thing, I was running late after seeing to some errands. Also, I was starving....
View ArticleJohn Slater’s Lean
What is poetry, anyway? I found myself musing about this as I sat with John Slater’s stimulating new collection, Lean. First I recalled what I’d once heard poet Li Young Lee say at a reading: In...
View ArticleArts and Faith Top 10 Films of 2016: Part 2
Continued from yesterday. [Link to yesterday’s post here] Here are the remaining five films in the Art and Faith Ecumenical Jury’s top ten films of 2016 list, as well as Honorable Mentions selected by...
View ArticleDisturbing the Silence: Part 2
Flocking to rural life and simple living can be just as much an attempt to avoid the darkness as binge-watching a TV show.
View ArticleThe Sound of Scorsese’s Silence
By Nick Olson It’s been nearly a month since I finally saw Scorsese’s Silence, and what I remember most is the cry of cicadas and how crucial sound is to the film’s translation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel....
View ArticleA Conversation with Van Gessel
By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Van Gessel has been Shusaku Endo’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation...
View ArticleSilent Mysteries
Lately, it seems, everyone is talking about silence—how they have less of it, how they wish they had more of it, how our Twittering lives have eaten away at some fundamental interior space that we...
View ArticleSinging Silence in A Far Country Near
“Without the traffic, silence / itself would sound red birdsong…” As I’m reading these lines in the poem “Seeing in Silence” in Murray Bodo’s latest volume, A Far Country Near: Poems New and Selected,...
View ArticleWriting the Land and Its Story: An Interview with Paul Kingsnorth, Part 1
“It’s the End of the World as We Know It…and He Feels Fine”—that’s how the New York Times Magazine titled a profile of the writer Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is an essayist and novelist, an Englishman...
View ArticleCutting Away the Noise
Fifteen years ago, there was no end to the noise. It took a cutting to get me to silence. I worked twelve-hour days and longer in an aircraft hangar on a flight line of hundreds of helicopters with the...
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