Shorts and a Sabine farm …

… The Consecrated Heretic, Down Under | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… every theology is a poetics: an account of what is and what is not, of what we must do and what we must not. "There'll always be religion around while there is poetry," says Murray, and then continues, in a deeply characteristic moment, "or a lack of it." Boccaccio wrote that the Bible is "the poetry of God," but Murray would give that title to the whole of Creation—including us. Like Shakespeare, this God is a master craftsman, but of a more difficult art, and his purposes and stratagems arise from an unknown poetics. To be a poet, for Murray, is to be a close reader of that Art, to reverse-engineer Creation in order to discover the dark principles by which it was made—and then to live accordingly. As his Centurion says, in response to rumors of the Resurrection, "It seems we are to be the poem / and live the impossible."