He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

by Christian Wiman

Poetry itself—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger—thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been.

Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it.

Hope is not hope until all ground for hope is lost, to paraphrase Marianne Moore.

How stale our spiritual language can sometimes seem in the face of a rare, clear spirit.

It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.

No, the casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive.

to finish a work of art is to be exiled from it.