Remembering Luci Shaw, and The Discipline of Noticing

“Beauty is there to be noticed. Too often it is taken for granted because we are moving too fast to let it in and allow it to deliver its message in us. We need to pay attention. To show indifference to beauty is an insult to its Creator.” — Luci Shaw

“Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. … What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being? The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.” — Iain McGilchrist

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” — Mary Oliver

Our Spring issue is one that has a special focus on Luci Shaw. Not only her, but her way of seeing—of paying attention. Because attention matters. In this issue you are going to be coming across a lot of that: how Luci paid attention to people, places, and things; and how that affected those she knew (in glorious and lovely ways). But attention, and noticing, as this issue suggests in its varying offerings, does not end with one life. It extends outward. It presses into the world we now inhabit.

For Interviews, we have:

• A Poetics of Presence: Malcolm Guite on Luci Shaw
• Marilyn McEntyre on Poetry and the Weight of a Word
• An Open Door, A Listening Life: Jeffrey Overstreet and Anne M. Doe Overstreet on Luci Shaw
• The Shape of a Faithful Life: Mary Kenagy Mitchell on Luci Shaw
• Luci Shaw: Reflections on a Literary Life (an interview from 2012)
• A Society of Conversation: Jim Stockton on his book The Oxford University Socratic Club, 1942–1972

The fiction, essays, columns, poetry, and reviews that follow continue this slow work. They explore what it means to contemplate amidst a need for urgency, to steward creation amid crisis, to tell the truth without losing tenderness, to wrestle honestly with anger, and to imagine peace with clarity rather than naïveté.

Features

• The Matter of Excellence: What if you are not Luci Shaw?
• Confronting Evil with God: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Curious Case of Jesus Knocking at the Door
• The Invisible Inner Law: Integrating King into an Evangelical Chinese Church
• On UN Resolution A/80/L.48: An Open Letter to the Church
• Amusing Ourselves to Depth? Attention and Humanity in the Age of AI
• Mysticism and the Mythological Feminine: How the West Killed Wonder (and Why the Church Must Bring It Back)
• In the Murky and Turbulent Depths: Angling in the Wilderness of Memory with a Mind of Dust
• Sage Advice: On Love, Suffering, Death, and God
• The Real Con Air: Inside America’s Airborne Prison Pipeline
• From the Road to Reflection (an excerpt from John Christopher Frame’s recently released work From Sea to Shining Sea: 50 Daily Devotions from Traveling to Every State in America)
• Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After

Columns

• Why Read a Poem at a Time Like This?
• Putting Contemplation into Action, Holding Action in Contemplation
• An MLK Retreat from Hopelessness

Reviews

• Hunger for Righteousness by Phoebe Farag Mikhail
• The Future of Love by John Poch
• God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and Christian Imagination by John Poch
• At The Still Point by Ron Starbuck
• You Are Accepted by Ron Starbuck
• this may be the year by Carole Giangrande
• Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After by Monika B. Hilder

Media

• Adapting Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle: Merlin in the Age of Streaming

Poetry

• Tehran, March
• Moses Goes to Scotland
• Ten Weeks
• One Last Blessing
• But Zion Said, The Lord Has Forsaken Me. Can a mother forget the child at her breast?
• The Gist of Us
• Beach Body
• Claw
• In Passing
• Feeding My Mother a Peach
• Exiles
• The Enfleshing of the Poet Maker
• Walking Trees

Fiction

• Valentine’s Day
• The Art of War (Second Stave)

Also, do check out Visually Sacred’s season 4, recently released! Arthur Aghajanian has some excellent conversations to share. Here are a few teaser titles: Jamie Brummitt: Relics and American Faith, Anthony Petro: Christianity and the Culture Wars, and Michael J. Crosbie: Spatial Justice in Sacred Space.

If this issue does anything, we hope it helps you slow, even slightly, to notice, even briefly, to recover the quiet but radical discipline of paying attention. For in the end, attention is not simply how we encounter the world. It is how we learn to receive it—and, perhaps, how we learn to love it. — M