On these would-be millennial times, the claim that "God is in the details" might easily be mistaken for another plug for spiritual shysters on the make--one more slogan for the verbal arsenal of God-hucksters so ready to link faith and fortune. Let us not forget that it has long been a rhetorical trope belonging to poets. To find Jehovah in the jasmine, Allah in an arabesque or Yahweh in the careful up-turn of a yak's horns is tantamount to saying that there is deliberative will and necessity in even the most infinitesimal. It is an idea of total design: a belief that life is an all-encompassing work of art. A paean to Mother Nature for some, the turn of phrase suggests that the order of the vast universe is legible in the crystalline structure of a molecule. Walt Whitman linked micro to macro, describing "a leaf of grass [as] no less than the journey-work of the stars." Karl Blossfield, photographer and master of plant-form typology, found a cosmos of structural precision in the... More >>>