The homepage of writer, artist, and priest Karl Stevens.
Welcome!
I am an Episcopal Priest, an artist, and a writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio. I serve as the Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, on the Ohio State University Campus. I am a Contemplative Christian, and that tradition is reflected in my art and writing. As an artist, I am very influenced by Medieval manuscript art, and by the Rothschild Canticles in particular. If you are interested in purchasing any of the art presented on this site, please send me an email.
Now we come to what is probably the most perilous moment in a lament. You might think that there’s peril in complaint, but it’s petition that is spiritually dangerous. Evelyn Underhill compared it with magic, the practice of a kind of wish-fulfillment that can easily disappoint if the things we pray for don’t appear in…
Continuing our project of writing laments using the ancient literary forms found in the Hebrew Scriptures, we turn to the naming of covenant. It is probably good to reiterate that the form of ancient lament has five parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. Today we investigate the third part, which actually…
Featured Image Credit: Kathe Kollwitz, “The Widow,” print, 1921 On Sunday, we continued to write laments in the style of the ancient Israelites. As I said in the last post, the genre of Biblical lament has five basic parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. In today’s post, I’ll talk about honest…