The Eternal Now

The Eternal Now: In Conversation with Paul Tillich - A Poetic Response: On Grace After the Fall is Ron Starbuck's seventh poetry collection. Between 1955 and 1963, Tillich preached sixteen sermons in the university chapels of Harvard and the University of Chicago - sermons later published as his final collection, The Eternal Now. He offered his listeners rooms to enter: loneliness and its narrow door, the riddle of an unequal harvest, the war running through the center of a single will, the demons dressed in ordinary hours. Starbuck answers each of those sixteen sermons in turn, not as commentary but as a second entry into the same rooms - poem for chapter, verse for sermon, across sixty years.

Running subtly alongside Tillich's voice is Arthur Miller's, drawn from his 1964 play After the Fall, staged in the same unsettled decade. Miller's Quentin stands before the ruined tower of a concentration camp, asking whether anyone can ever be innocent again. Starbuck's poems take up that same unresolved question and follow it toward Tillich's answer - not innocence restored, but grace received within the fracture itself.

Organized in three parts - The Human Predicament, The Divine Reality, and The Challenge to Man - the collection moves from solitude and inequality to spiritual presence and salvation, culminating in a final charge to stand firm, think with maturity, and give thanks in all things. Written for readers of contemplative poetry, faith-based verse, and theological reflection, The Eternal Now continues the inheritance Starbuck traces to his father, a United Methodist minister and psychotherapist who first introduced him to Tillich's sermons - carrying that inheritance forward, as his earlier collection You Are Accepted did.