The Grace of Incorruption: The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith and Poetics
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Professor of literature, scholar, teacher of poets and poetry, convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church, man of prayer, Donald Sheehan wrote these wide-ranging essays with a common 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 Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac and Ephraim of Syria, Sergius of Radonezh, Herman of Alaska; the literary art of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Frost, Salinger, and contemporary poets Jane Kenyon, Sydney Lea, and Nicholas Samaras; the philosophy of René Girard—examining the nature of penitence, prayer, personhood, freedom, depression, and the right relationship to the earth. Part Two delves into the poetics of Psalms, especially LXX 118: a “poetics of resurrection,” a poetics that came to govern the lifework of an extraordinary man, blessed with faith, learning, and humility.
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- Approaches to art, to other people, and to God.
- Offers access to the profound, compelling stillness at the heart of all things.
- Allows readers to travel back and forth between the temporal and spiritual worlds.
Forgive the personalism of this comment, but 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.
-- Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate
In this beautiful book, Dostoyevsky, Orthodox liturgy, and Holy Fathers ancient and modern converse with Shakespeare, Frost, Salinger, Jane Kenyon and Rene Girard, with insight into memory, violence, depression, stillness, self-emptying love, personhood, and “the anthropology of the Cross.” Don Sheehan was not only a fine interpreter of poetry, but a poet himself, working in the medium of prose. His spirit of loving attentiveness -- never lacking in form -- characterized his approach to art, to other people, and to God.
-- Fr. Matthew Baker (of Blessed Memory!)
The overabundant sparseness of Don Sheehan’s life grabbed my heart. From St. Ephraim and Shakespeare to Frost and Holy Scripture, this book illumines his truly ascetic struggle. Like the word of God, it is “sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4.12). If you are willing to take the time, he will strip back every distraction to reveal the “drama of intimacy” we sadly so often distractedly miss.
-- Archpriest Thomas Moore
- Title: The Grace of Incorruption: The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith and Poetics
- Author: Donald Sheehan
- Publisher: Paraclete Press
- Print Publication Date: 2015
- Pages: 290
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9781612616018, 1612616011
- Resource ID: LLS:GRCNCRRPTNFPTCS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-02-10T20:06:18Z