It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.