The Reading Life
Theology Animated: Serene Jones’ Call It Grace
Call it Grace is not so much a primer on theology as it is a way of animating it. At its base, it’s a memoir and a telling of Jones’ life story overlaid with a theological lens. The book is full of the people that populate her world:
What Silence Has to Say: A Review of Pablo d’Ors Biography of Silence
It turns out that sitting in silence with my own self makes for uncomfortable, awkward hours of company. I like myself a lot less than I thought. Slowly though, I tried to better sit with the given day, tried to hear the room around me and make space for whatever thought might slide through the door unbidden
Small Miracles & Happy Dances
With each order that comes through we seriously do a happy dance knowing that the good work of our contributors will be seen and held by more hearts and our little nonprofit is earning the funds that will help us start the new year strong. Our staff is deeply encouraged as we witness each intimate act of one human sharing something they love with another.
Stories and the Lives They Save
Stories do save lives—they always have, and they always will. We use stories to make sense of the world around us. We may sometimes turn to them for escape, and other times for answers to questions that plague us. Stories instruct. Stories uplift. Stories...validate the fact that we matter, that we are not alone.
Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Issue 46, A Way Through
The theme for this issue is strategically reserved. It does not reveal the way through or even promise that one exists. Nor does it advise how one should get through a day, a life, or even a poem.
Ruminate Roundup: Poetry
Ruminate's recent poetry contributors have been busy writing books, and we are featuring them in this post. Take a look at this Ruminate Roundup of the talented writers whose work you might enjoy!
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
At the moment, the assumption to question is that we humans have a right to be on earth and that it will indefinitely support us. When the very ground is taken from beneath our feet, where can we stand? What is left to us, when the familiar forms of our physical existence are taken away? Nothing, perhaps—yet I wonder.
Reading for the Common Good
In Reading for the Common Good, Smith explores the role—the necessity— of reading for the betterment of our individual lives, our churches, our neighborhoods, and ultimately the world...In a world pushing us to go go go…Smith invites us to slow down—to slow down and read.
Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Issue 45, Unfinished
...to finish, to be finished, is not a romantic, miraculous achievement, but a construct we impose upon our lives to produce some semblance of progress....The poems in this issue expose this tension, the potential and the anxiety present in the unfinished. They wrestle with the finality of death, the specter of memory, and the desire to change that which is not yet done.
Ambition: Inquiries and Gentle Conclusions
At the heart of this collection is a set of inquiries into the nature of ambition: Is it good, bad, or neutral? How might we best wield it?...Reassuringly, there is no Monolithic Christian Stance on ambition to be found here. Although every author is committed to both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the tradition of literary craft, they come to a plurality of gentle conclusions about the dilemma that ambition poses.
Prodigal by E. VyVy Trinh
We almost never missed a Sunday mass. Still, by the time I was in high school, Jesus couldn’t compete for my attention, which had been stolen by Harry Potter, a pretty girl at school with frazzled black curls, and general fascination with my own wild interiority.
A Gathering of Larks
Contemplative and amusing, Abigail Carroll’s A Gathering of Larks is an invitation to listen and to take delight in what one hears. It is an invitation to birdsong, to jokes and performances, to rustling leaves, and to one’s own voice asking questions into the world. But most of all, it is an invitation to friendship of a new kind, one unlimited by temporal proximity.
“What’s Lasting”: Soul-Shaping Poems
Mark Burrows has curated a collection of poems that calls us back not only to stillness and to deep looking, but also to the place where we will be opened to a new abundance. In many ways, this endeavor lets us reconnect to our spiritual nature and, importantly, quenches our profound longing for what’s lasting.
Sinatra in His Kitchen
What’s Sinatra doing? Looking glum and holding a sandwich. This photograph struck me as inexplicably sad. However Sinatra may have felt at that moment, whatever he was thinking as he held his sandwich, we will never know.
The Physicality of Things
I’ve spent much of my adulthood astonished by what I was supposed to learn in school but didn’t or forgot. The earth’s mantle, stardust and the miraculous heart, which pumps two thousand gallons of blood every day. Did God make me forgetful of the body and the earth or is forgetting my sin, a feature of the fall?
Creative Lives Part 4
I'm thrilled that they've allowed us to share their conversation with you in this series titled "Creative Lives." You can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 here. Part 4 begins in November of 2016, after a sobering election day. Julie and Melissa ask the question: what does it mean to create in the midst of a broken world?
Creative Lives Part 3
I'm thrilled that they've allowed us to share their conversation with you in this series titled "Creative Lives." You can read part 1 and part 2 here. In this installment Julie and Melissa talk about the particulars of their creative process and the necessary blessing of having readers contribute to the narrative.
Creative Lives Part 1
A few months ago we were delighted to receive letters from two of our poetry prize winners. Julie L. Moore won our 2008 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize; Melissa Reeser Poulin is the 2016 Poetry Prize winner. They wrote to us, independently, about the role Ruminate played in affirming their journeys as a creative people.
In the “Desert of the Ordinary”
In Pilgrim's Gait, his twenty-first book, David Craig brings to bear his considerable craft and accumulated wisdom to explore the way of the pilgrim, both in the sense of where the pilgrim walks and in the sense of how (with what “gait” or footsteps) the pilgrim walks. Individual poems offer a wealth of detail and a delightful energy of phrase and movement.
Embracing the Body and What the Body Knows
ALL THAT HE HAD MADE (all) was very good. These are not complicated words, and yet for many centuries, it seems, we have failed to receive them. Cautioned by New Testament exhortations, we’ve assumed the Genesis writer’s generosity and inclusion of every part of creation to be poetic device, quietly maintaining that...
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.