“All the world’s a stage” where we play different roles and parts, “men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII, Lines 1-2). The stages of life (infancy, childhood, lover, soldier, judge, old age, and return to childhood “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” line 28) are indeed…

This poem was inspired by a poem written by my dear friend, Jerome Gastaldi, whom you may know as Bob Abbott. The last stanza starts . . . Some do not want to know. For the pain of knowing  Is the death Of their illusion. —Jerome Gastaldi Riding the train. A pane of glass is…

If you know me, then you know how much I love spoken word poetry and song lyrics. Creative lyrics–by disparate bands from two different songs separated by three decades–come to mind. In chronological order, the first music group is the American rock band known as The Doors, who everyone has heard of, from Generation Xers…

The withering of the imagination to the point of poetic impotency at the hands of reason (logos) clad knowledge-seekers during the epoch of the Enlightenment left a void in its philosophical wake. But as we know from experience, human nature has a way of redressing itself by swinging the proverbial pendulum back toward what it…

In order to invoke imagination, we must break free from the contempt of illusion by appealing to the wondrous child in people. Doubt is the current condition; impartiality is the preferred attitude; familiarity—the hackneyed cavity; and so the method is to strike the “nerve of novelty” (as Chesterton brilliantly puts it), in order to achieve the goal of being winsome, like a fetching story…

Come, touch my lips, my Lord, caress
With flesh the flesh of me;
One mortal morsel and my “Yes!”
Shall make me one with thee.
Come, kiss thee into me.

Aretaics and arts were never meant to exist separately from one another. They were meant to overlap (not just on paper but in our own lives) and be an example or an apologetic for others to witness.

As sensitive (artistic) souls, those of us who have the capacity to hold in the most light, light that shines brightest from fragile jars that are living miracles of the conversion of the sweetest wine from the sludge of the darkest and deepest bayous, we were designed as living metaphors of empathy and dependency. We…

This is a unique conference that marries rational apologetics to imaginative apologetics, the art of defending truth claims and the art of creatively expressing truth claims.

Yes, My Friends, This multi-faceted, multi-challenging, multi-year project is finally complete. With 120 poems, 70 prose, and 10 short stories–that will simultaneously stretch and encourage you–From the Ashes We Rise is a literary force to be read and reckoned with. This book seamlessly weaves Arts and Apologetics all throughout its 556 pages. See why From…