I've long wanted to do an episode on poetry. Unfortunately, many had a bad experience and long ago concluded they just aren't the poetic type. But Jeff Munroe was the perfect guest to help explain why an appreciation of poetry is critical for reading the Bible and why its worth a second chance.

Jeff Munroe is an executive vice president at Western Theological Seminary, where he also teaches writing. He was a charter member of the advisory board of the Buechner Institute of Faith and Culture, and is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America.

He is the author of 2019 book, Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher. Jeff is also a poet, blogger, and essayist. His work has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, US Catholic, and The Reformed Journal.

And as his bio says, he’s the only guy on his block who knows both who played shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949 and the closing lines of Middlemarch

Poems Discussed:

• What do poems do? by Brian Doyle
• The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
• The Way it Is by William Stafford
• The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins