Jonathan VanAntwerpen's Blog

Free as a driving wheel
Circling around your iron will
See only what you feel
Keeps you turning when you’re standing still

You tried to run from trouble when it comes
You followed the drum, keeping time with everyone

High as the light of day
You’re falling down across your lost highway
Pain, does it hurt this way?
To come so far to find they’ve closed the gates

You’ve lost your tongue when you fall from the pendulum
Your heart is a drum keeping t...

“Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart poro...

“To tell a more expansive story of American religion in all of its diversity, we must work together to plumb the plurality of religion in its kaleidoscopic and everchanging forms, considering anew the many different ways that religion animates and illuminates what it means to be human.”

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“My father has gone to join my mother and their elders just beyond the rim of the seen. And I am asking language to lead me to the bridge, the brink, the edge of what the great poet Lucille Clifton once called the lip of our understanding. Because I understand it is here that the hard work of my generation, the work of living together with others, must take place.

Have I learned anything from that once-ago season? Have I gathered any lesson from the ...

Written by Pádraig Ó Tuama

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your att...

An Interview with Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is a program director at the Henry Luce Foundation, where he leads a grants program that aims to promote innovative thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts, to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religi...

Pastor Van.

That was how I first came to know him.

Pastor Van had a big beard, a big smile, a big laugh, a big voice.

And, we would learn, a big heart.

He liked to ski (thank you for that gift, Dad).

He built an ice skating rink in our backyard.

He taught me how to ride a bike.

And once, he drove right over me with our Oldsmobile station wagon.

I was alright, as it turned out. And years later we made a joke of it.

He loved to joke. With ...

“I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. ‘Find peace in your memories,’ I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, ‘This is what you will never again have.’ Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain. I hope that it is a question of time — tha...

“All poems use craft; careful choice of words, linebreaks, metaphor and form. I love these elements of poetry, but I know that such technicalities are not the only way to love a poem. Most people remember a poem because it reminds them of something: a grief of their own; a moment of love in their life; a decision they had to make; a time of wonder and delight; a landscape they had forgotten; a pain they carried. Somehow, those little clockworks get into the heart...