... and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
            --"The Wreck of the Deutschland"

I love teaching Christian spirituality and Hopkins because in the conjunction of prayer and poetry "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things" -- the encounter with self, the search for God's touch, the feeling that Christ finds me in all the imperfect particularities of my life, and therein invites, encourages, and challenges me to act justly, compassionately, faithfully. In Hopkins' words:

...the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
      --"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame"

• "A New Historicist Glance at Gerard Manley Hopkins," Gonzaga University, 2003.
• "Praying with Hopkins" In Hopkins Variations: Standing round a Waterfall, edited by Joaquin Kuhn and Joseph J. Feeney. Philadelphia and New York: St. Joseph's University Press and Fordham University Press, 2002.
• "Prayer, Poetry and Spiritual Transformation," paper delivered at Hopkins: the Rome Conference, The Gregorian University, Rome, Italy, October 2002. Posted at http://www.regis.edu/hopkinsrome.
• "Jesuit Spiritual Practices," Bannan Center for Jesuit Education, Santa Clara University, 2002.
• "All Shall Be Well: The Anchoritic Spirituality of Julian of Norwich," Santa Clara University Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program lecture series, 2002.
• "Poetry and Prayer, Reading for Transformation through the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins," a paper delivered by special invitation to the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and the American Academy of Religion, Denver, Colorado, November 2001.
• "Praying Hopkins: A Method for Exploring the Spiritually Transformative Potential with Hopkins' Poetics," Regis University, Denver, Colorado, 2001.
• "To Seem the Stranger: Prayer, Poetry, and Hopkins," International Gerard Manley Hopkins Society, 2000 Summer School, Monasterevin, Ireland.