As Our Fathers Told Us: Religious Poetry in a Post-Christian Age
Ebook
All of us are confronted by the new world of digital distance, perpetual connectivity, change at warp speed, and broken past beliefs. For pastors dealing with secularism and its magnetic pull on youth, this world is as confounding as the one Columbus met or astronauts faced. For some youth struggling to find a path, nihilism is a possible choice. Many young people are beginning to leave the church, with no idea about where to land. Poetry, based in experience, offers them a common ground on which to meet and speak.
The poems in As Our Fathers Told Us try to walk the border between old wisdom and new realities, in a language in which both pastors and youthful seekers may dialog.
“Wonderful poems that sing the simple beauty of existence. Placidus Henry writes in the Zen spirit, seeing our world through the presence of God. These poems are containers of incantations that bring attention to the holiness of our nature.”
—Timothy Hogan, psychotherapist
“Placius Henry is keen observer with deep human empathy and a poet’s sense. As Our Fathers Told Us is an important contribution to our American working-class literary culture and a worthy read.”
—Al Markowitz, editor of Blue Collar Review
“This small collection of poems is a distillation of a lifelong search for the deeper meaning in the mundane. Brother Placidus does not regard the spiritual as disjointed and external to the material, but rather as an intrinsic component of God’s creation. As we depart from the wisdom of our fathers, reality looks bleak and hopeless. And yet, through the eyes of a ‘secular monk,’ God is truly present everywhere. These poems are an invitation to encounter God, here and now.”
—Costin Popescu, parish priest, Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston
- Title: As Our Fathers Told Us: Religious Poetry in a Post-Christian Age
- Author: Placidus Henry
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666748239, 9781666748222, 1666748226, 9781666748215, 1666748218, 1666748234
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666748239
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-18T20:10:31Z
Placidus Henry is a former psychiatric social worker whose clients often brought questions of faith into the therapy hour. After watching four generations of young Americans struggle with their identities, and with their country’s struggle with itself, it became clearer to him that if two millennia of the Christian ethos were not becoming lost or erased, they were certainly becoming smudged by the distractions of secular culture. Poetry is the medium of distilled experience. The poetry here covers the areas of youthful love, work, military service, and social injustice, seen through the lens of a searcher’s spirituality.