Taos and Albuquerque, New Mexico, 9.2016: Penitentes and Red Hollyhocks — A Photographic Essay

"El Penitente," Martha Graham, Harwood Museum of Art

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 9.2016: Lions Couchants and Friends' Meeting Houses — A Photographic Essay

Bert Geer Phillips, "Our Washerwoman's Family," Santa Fe Musuem of Art

(Enroute to) San Francisco 6.6.1990: Great Meteor Craters and Theological Gabfests

Writing enroute to San Francisco, having just crossed over what the pilot tells us is the “great meteor crater” on the New Mexico-Arizona border. I’m going to the Catholic Theology Society of America meeting to be on a panel discussing the bicentennial history of American Catholicism series.

The College Theology Society meeting just occurred in New Orleans. Bulletin—we’re approaching a rim of the Grand Canyon. CTS: I gave my paper on public theology as civil discourse. It was well-received—almost too much so. Audience packed with friends, including Stephen and Hilary S., her sister Rebecca C., and John M.

Speaking of whom: we all spent Sunday evening together, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, it was a very up experience. Sitting at Café du Monde and drinking coffee and talking, talking. About Bush, politics, church, theology, Stephen’s father. I felt a real sense of shared struggle, of community, that I often don’t feel with my American colleagues. Canadians are just more well-read (on the whole) and more tolerant in a genial, worldly-wise way—particularly re: homosexuality.

El Paso, Texas 24.11.01: Lure of Silence and Vast Space

Sunrise in El Paso, as we wait at the airport for our flight to Little Rock by way of Dallas. The mountains outside the window now totally in the light, ribs of brown, taupe, and gray against the light blue. The light leaves little undisclosed in the West.

All day yesterday, a fierce dust storm that caused the death of two people on the interstate in New Mexico, and the closing of the interstate. The dust began, by noon, to hang on the horizon, a thick yellowish haze in the air like smoke from a distant fire. It came into cracks in buildings and coated our skins with fine powder, putting grit onto our teeth.

Life here: the lure of mountain and dry land, the lure people like Georgia O’Keefe felt, must be the lure of silence and vast space. Everything else—including the nattering of human concern—vanishes in such a landscape, so that one is left alone. Or with God. No wonder the desert fathers; no wonder the birth of Judaism, Islam, Christianity in desert places.