Jill Baumgaertner

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  From Shade To Shine

  $20.00

  This collection of poems begins in the growing darkness of November, stretches through Advent and the seasons leading to Easter and to Pentecost, and ends in the budding light of the Scottish Orkney Islands, where the canonical hours measure time over centuries and where God broods over an austere and beautiful landscape. The measurement of time passing and returning, year after year, in the rhythms of the seasons and of the liturgical year, create the pace and the song. But in the biblical voices of Magdalene, Mary, Abel, and Eve, and in the grim historical and political realities of war and suffering, one also hears lament and finds the poet’s clear-eyed gaze straight into life’s challenges. Memory is at work here, too, in personal reminiscences and in theological reflection. As one philosopher has said, “All truth is God’s truth.”

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  What Cannot Be Fixed

  $16.00

  What Cannot Be Fixed is anchored in the terrain of the broken world: the old Adam, the prodigal son, loneliness, exile, and Christ’s cries of abandonment on the cross. There is much that cannot be fixed, but in the midst of the loss are the flashes and glimmers of promise, of Advent, of reunion, the empty tomb, and grace. Words uncurl in Eve’s throat, the conductor raises his baton in that split second before the music begins, the blind see, the atheist heart patient hears God in the music of the recovery room. God is there, his shape sometimes difficult to discern, his words often whispers amidst the daily-ness of life. This collection of poems is about living the paradox: simul justus et peccator-the believer is both justified and a sinner. It is true that much of what we see and live cannot be fixed. And it is also true that the potter reworks the broken pot.

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  Imago Dei : Poems From Christianity And Literature

  $17.99

  Imago Dei brings together a collection of poets who merge faith, literature, and art as a form of worship and inspiration.

  An anthology of the best poems published in the journal Christianity and Literature over the past sixty years, Imago Dei brings together in one volume poetry which exemplifies the richness and variety of the art. These poems find beauty in the concrete and particular, but they also ask the big questions: Why do we exist? Who is God? Where do we find God? What does the Incarnation mean? When does God speak to us, and why is God silent?

  These poets all have in common an awareness of human experience as part of a grand narrative, of the Imago Dei embedded in human nature, and of the sense of connection to something much larger than themselves. These are poems written from within a theological tradition, though they are not necessarily traditional in form or expression. They upset the usual in their originality; they are Worded words, connected to our earthly life but pointed toward the Kingdom of God; they are redemptive words made flesh.

  Included in the over one hundred poets represented here are Wendell Berry, Mark Jarmon, Jeanne Murray Walker, Dana Gioa, Martha Serpas, Luci Shaw, and Robert Siegel. All of the poets in this collection grapple with what Imago Dei means for them as readers, writers, artists, teachers, and students.

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