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Description: Dust and Prayers offers an evocation of love, human and divine, and of the struggles of believers and unbelievers. It depicts something of the human condition apart from God and, through praise and lament, with humor and pathos it speaks of the divine remedy. It speaks of creation, too, and of the Creator, and of humanity (created in God's image), as dust and spirit. Its voice at times is free of the constraints of rigorous poetic forms. At other times its voice is set free by adherence to them. Its cry is biblical: Lord, "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24)! It references the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Apostle Paul's letters, and strains to come to terms with God's Holy Presence felt as Holy Absence in, with, under-and in front of-the text. Its hope is grounded in the blessed disturbance with which the Christ, attested in Holy Scripture, proffers the "blessed assurance" that we are his. Endorsements: "Bartow's poems serve their purposes with dignity and grace. Appropriating and adapting traditional forms, he has commemorated not only the large events that give shape to specific lives--birth, death, marriage--but also the small moments in which grace becomes visible in a squirrel, a shaft of light on a forest path, an awakened memory of an old teacher. We hear in these poems echoes of Herbert, Emerson, and Frost, and of the biblical stories and scenes that deeply inform the poet's sensibility and frame his understanding of 'ordinary' life, which insists, like Hopkins, that nothing is really ordinary, because 'it is all a purchase, all a prize.'" --Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, author of Christ, My Companion: Meditations on the Prayer of St. Patrick "Stop, keep still, and listen to the soul stirring poems in this collection. Charles Bartow lays these pieces before us like steppingstones across his passion for God, God's gospel, and God's Creation. His work is honest, heart-felt, and inspiring. Take them up, give them voice, and watch them dance in the Spirit!" --Richard F. Ward, author of Speaking of the Holy: The Art of Communication in Preaching About the Contributor(s): Charles L. Bartow is Carl and Helen Egner Professor of Speech Communication in Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of God's Human Speech: A Practical Theology of Proclamation (1997).
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