These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains that, "Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty." While the poet might be prayerful and the mystic might wax poetic, there is a "fundamental difference which separates the poetic experience from the mystical experience: while the poet progresses toward the Word, the mystic tends toward Silence." As Raïssa Maritain expounds, mystics may be moved to describe their heightened experiences, but for them this "expression is not a means of completing the experience." For the furnishing of her interior castle, a mystic like St. Teresa of Avila needs no speech; her talk, the record she left us of the "prayer of quiet," is "only a result of superabundance, a generous attempt at communication." The poet, on the contrary, cannot do without words. They are the vital stuff of his service to the world. Albert Béguin corroborates Maritain's conclusion, contending that "whatever value one attributes to the poetic act, it remains an act submitted to the necessity of form. It ends at the word." On the other hand, the poetic word points beyond language, ever striving for a fuller communion with reality and its Maker. Inhabiting the tensions between sense and nonsense, poetry and mysticism, articulation and its absence, Maritain manifests the hidden mysteries at the heart of all poetry worthy of the name.

In a diverse and innovative selection of new essays by cutting-edge theologians and philosophers, Suffering Religion examines one of the most primitive but challenging questions to define human experience - why do we suffer? As a theme uniting very different religious and cultural traditions, the problem of suffering addresses issues of passivity, the vulnerability of embodiment, the generosity of love and the complexity of gendered desire. Interdisciplinary studies bring different kinds of interpretations to meet and enrich each other. Can the notion of goodness retain meaning in the face of real affliction, or is pain itself in conflict with meaning? Themes covered include: *philosophy's own failure to treat suffering seriously, with special reference to the Jewish tradition *Martin Buber's celebrated interpretations of scriptural suffering *suffering in Kristevan psychoanalysis, focusing on the Christian theology of the cross *the pain of childbirth in a home setting as a religiously significant choice *Gods primal suffering in the kabbalistic tradition *Incarnation as a gracious willingness to suffer.