Content uptick

To the imaginary people who follow this blog, I have an announcement: more content is coming. Yesterday evening, I deleted my Facebook. Not just deactivated, but actually deleted. I'd been battling through a years-long love/hate relationship with the platform for a host of reasons, but the collision of a pandemic, nationwide race riots, and a presidential re-election campaign heightened the multidimensional awfulness of Facebook to a degree that the decision to finally and permanently leave the place became quite easy. I expect to fill the increased free time at least partially with more reading and writing than I've devoted energy to in the past, so it's likely I'll be publishing here more frequently in the months to come.

There are a handful of books I'll probably be picking up soon, and one of them is a compilation of writings from the late Donald Sheehan, a former professor of English at Dartmouth, and before that at the University of Chicago. I became aware of him through a Facebook group I used to be a member of, an association of "reviewers" who had advance access to upcoming releases from Ancient Faith Publishing. A collection of Sheehan's writings is forthcoming from AF that chronicles his life experiences both praying and translating the Psalter.

But this isn't the book I've decided to begin with. Learning of Sheehan (whose name I was already familiar with through the work of his son) sent me on a little biographical investigation that led me to another posthumously published collection of his writings, titled The Grace of Incorruption: Selected Essays on Orthodox Faith and Poetics. The Amazon reviews of the volume are gushing to say the least, and the endorsements on the back cover are no less so. From the book's description:

Professor of literature, teacher of poets and poetry, and convert to Easter Orthodoxy, Donald Sheehan wrote these wide-ranging essays with a commitment to understanding the ways in which the ruining oppositions of our experience can be held within the disciplines of lyric art--held "until God himself can be seen in the ruins...and overwhelmingly and gratefully loved." That is what Sheehan means by "the grace of incorruption." Part One weaves together themes from Sheehan's life and pilgrimages, the spiritual art of Orthodox saints, the literary art of writers such as Dostoevsky, Frost, and Salinger, and the philosophy of René Girard--examining the nature of penitence, personhood, freedom, depression, and stillness. Part Two delves into the poetics of the Psalms, especially LXX 118: a "poetics of resurrection."

​One back cover endorsement was especially effusive, from Vermont Poet Laureate, Sydney Lea:

I am dead certain that my response to this volume will chime with those of others whose work is held up to the light in The Grace of Incorruption. On beholding Donald Sheehan's elucidation of our efforts, in one beautiful sentence after another, we must share the uncanny sense of never having understood our own hearts--not until we saw them reflected in the great heart (and mind) of this nonpareil commentator. Don Sheehan did not merely understand poetry; it was part and parcel of his own great soul."

It's difficult to resist an impulse buy after reading such high praise! The Grace of Incorruption, the contents of which were assembled and edited by Sheehan's own surviving wife, Xenia, seemed like a necessary prelude to his forthcoming reflections on the Psalter.

In addition to his academic career, Sheehan was founding director of The Frost Place.

I hope to begin posting occasional reflections on Grace soon.