The field of theopoetics explores the ways in which we "make God" (present)--particularly through language. This book explores questions of theopoetics as they relate to the central poetry of the American Sublime. It offers a fresh, theological engagement with what literary critic Harold Bloom terms the American religion (transcendentalism: Emerson's homespun mysticism). Specifically, it seeks to rehabilitate Emerson's concept of self-reliance from the charge of gross egoism, by situating ...

Malcolm Guite is a well-known and respected English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic, widely acknowledged for his writings on the intersection of religion and the arts. His poetry was once characterized as “modern-day metaphysical poems and psalms.” He has written 5 books of poetry, of which Seven Whole Days may be one of his finest. Artist Faye Hall has taken Guite’s poetic sequence in Seven Whole Days and turned it into a splendid visual celebration of God’s good Cr...

A lucid summary and interpretation of the Christian faith from "one of the leading Christian poets of our time" ( Jeremy Begbie, Duke University)."I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."—Jesus ChristChristianity began as a minor sect within Judaism and has become one of the major world religions. What started as a small group of people who shared the same language, lifest...

An Artist's Look at Theology, Art, and PhilosophyDear Tom,Thanks for writing again—and for this unusually philosophical response to my letter! In response: my theology of art is my theology. Period. I think of God as the Artist and all human artists as eternal apprentices. Consequently, all my thinking about God involves the centrality of beauty and the act of making. As I've said many times, we were made by a Maker to be makers. . . ....

Under the Terebinth invites readers into a shaded place, where questions are welcomed, where beauty is real and made manifest in caterpillars and whale song, and where Sorrow, personified looms large.

Poetry has always been a central element of Christian spirituality and is used in worship, in pastoral services and guided meditation. In Sounding the Seasons, Cambridge poet and priest Malcolm Guite transforms seventy lectionary readings into lucid, inspiring poems, for use in regular worship, seasonal services, meditative reading or on retreat. This second edition includes further sonnets for the Christian year written since the original edition, including a sequence of 19 sonnets on the...

The Word within the Words is a Poet's Credo, in which Malcom Guite sets out to show how his Christian faith informs and underpins his poetry and, in turn, how poetry itself and, more widely, the poetic imagination help him understand and interpret his faith. After a brief introduction outlining a theology of Christ as the Word, the essential logos or meaning that underlies all things made flesh for us in Jesus, there are short chapters on Scripture, liturgy, and sacrament...

Poet's Corner is Malcolm Guite's delectable column that appears on the back page of the Church Times each week. This second collection brings together more than seventy columns created from little glimpses and reflections from all corners of the country, the musings of a poet's mind, and the corners and alleyways of our literary heritage. Malcolm's lucid, perceptive and imaginative columns follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned, with a sense of development, of ...

The bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses forty poems from across the centuries that express the universal experience of loss and reflects on them in order to draw out the comfort, understanding and hope they offer. Some of the poems will be familiar, many will be new, but together they provide a sure companion for the journey across difficult terrain. Some of Malcolm’s own poetry is included, written out of his work as a priest with the dying and the bereaved and giving to the volume a p...

Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. This book is not solely concerned with overtly religious poetry, but attends to the paradoxical ways in which the...

When Michael Ward's Planet Narnia emerged a decade ago, myriad things were pulled into its orbit: The immense gravitational force altered the field of C.S. Lewis studies, to be sure, but the discovery's scope stretched far into the worlds of literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and the arts.Only now, after ten years under its influence, have we begun to consider the magnitude of Planet Narnia's effects, and perhaps it is best to begin such an index by cultivating a jovial atm...

This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as ‘the church's banquet’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘the Milky Way’, ‘the bird of paradise’ and ‘something understood’. In conversation with each of these, Malc...