The twentieth-century Welsh poet R.S. Thomas has been called a poet of Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday falls between the day of Christ’s crucifixion and the morning of His resurrection. Commemorative of Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead, Holy Saturday, and the poetry of R.S. Thomas, also speak evocatively to times when we feel caught somewhere between devastation and hope, between periods of spiritual suffering and the experience of God’s blessing. With Easter approaching, we spoke with Richard McLauchlan—an independent scholar, professional biographer, and author of Saturday’s Silence: R.S. Thomas and Paschal Reading—about the day between crucifixion and resurrection, a day of suffering and silence that speaks to the spiritual realities so many of us feel.
Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center.
Produced and edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob
Matthew Wickman is a professor of English at Brigham Young University. He served as the founding director of the BYU Humanities Center the past...
Mark Eaton is Professor of American Literature at Azusa Pacific University and also, since 2015, editor of the journal Christianity and Literature, now in...
Denise Levertov was an outstanding poet who became one of the finest religious poets of the twentieth century, or any century. Cristina Gámez-Fernández is...
