I've had several hymns running through my head the past couple of days. One is "For All the Saints," which many congregations will be singing this Sunday. It's a majestic song -- the cheerful agnostic was a brilliant hymn composer -- and at my home congregation, it's sung in full harmony and then some, with a bright soprano descant soaring through the Alleluias. I'll be preaching away from home tomorrow, and while that will offer its own sets of joys, I had a moment earlier this week when I realized that being away means I won't be singing (and hearing) "For All the Saints."

Then again, there's nothing to stop me from singing it to myself on the drive east. "Let There Be Light" has also been insistently running through my head, especially every time I skim something election-related. (Lori-Lyn Hurley and Jim Wallis have recent essays that I see as expansions of its theme: "Let there be light /open our hearts to wonder / perish the way of terror ...") (And, following LLH's link to Wallis led me to John Koch's column on How My Lesbian Boss Makes Me a Better Father. Hear, hear.)

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Via Debbie Kolodji: information for entering the 2009 AAAS Science Dance contest. Deadline is November 16.

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William Logan has an essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that offers one of the liveliest discussions of the two I've read. This passage tickles me...

A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century's Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs...

...and the information in this one won't be news to anyone familiar with their careers, but I'm impressed by Logan's compact blend of illustration and assessment:

These lives were marked by terrible sadness. Bishop's Brazilian lover committed suicide; the poet continued drinking until she started falling down and injuring herself. Lowell's degrading seizures of manic depression, during which he often behaved contemptibly, left him in a permanent state of semi-apology. His three marriages, each time to a novelist, ended badly. Though sometimes blocked or depressed, as a poet Lowell would suddenly bull his way forward; Bishop, timid as a turtle, often terribly lonely, slowly produced small masterpieces, finishing only one or two poems a year (she said, "I've always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it"). The interstices of their lives were remade as art; but that is not enough, if you have to live the life afterward. Even in their 40s, they sound worn out. [Emphasis mine.]