On Christian Wiman's He Held Radical Light

America: The Jesuit Review's poetry editor, Joe Hoover, S.J., reviews Christian Wiman's new book, He Held Radical Light (FSG, 2018). "In Radical Light, Wiman, a poet and professor of religion and literature at Yale, is plundering the question of the 'art of faith, the faith of art,'" writes Hoover. "He barely gives any leeway to either side." More:

...All easy answers about how spirituality informs the arts and vice versa are given fierce interrogation.

“Nothing prisons truth so quickly,” he writes, “as an assurance that one has found it.” Our notions of where goodness is can be upended like that. He has a preconceived truth that Mary Oliver, “the most famous poet in the country,” is not as great as everyone thinks she is; then has it thrown back in his face. No, she’s really got it, as a writer and a person. The Holy Spirit is often exactly where you don’t think it will be.

Whether it comes from surviving a life-threatening lymphoma diagnosis 15 years prior (which Wiman wrote about in his sublime 2013 memoir My Bright Abyss) or simply from having a naturally sharp and suspicious artistic mind, Wiman takes neither the operations of God nor beauty for granted.

Read on at America.