Faith crisis is pervasive within religious traditions of all flavors. Unresolved, it can lead to departure from one’s own tradition or failure to engage in the first place. I have found it useful to frame…
Was it foolish or inspired—this idea of smuggling the spirit of Christmas into the canal-side neighborhoods of Thailand? Could a red suit and a cotton beard convey a message where rote memorized discussions had sometimes…
Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes, the latest book by the longtime policy journalist and public thinker, presents two broad arguments: first, that throughout American history, Christian churches have played an essential role in enabling our liberal…
The triumph of The Dead Fathers is an ending that I don’t dare spoil; it lands as an epic culmination of a subtly expanding panorama I hadn’t seen coming. John Bennion spends nearly five hundred pages in Utah’s West Desert—spare, wind-scoured, abandoned and rediscovered—and then, in the final movements, he opens the aperture until a hermit’s private grief feels communal, even cosmic. If that sounds grand, it is. Bennion delivers the unexpected.
I take my invitation to speak to you today very seriously. I give this message motivated by love and concern and hope for all of us, and I ask you to accept these words in the same way.
Standing in front of the sink rubbing the soap on my palms and through my fingers, I focus more on my gray hairs in the two inches of undyed regrowth reflected in the mirror than…
Beloved, you live unofficially
in decommissioned scripture
condescended to metaphor
a footnote to pages
Wind.
Wyoming howls relentlessly under July sun and we drive on
Past antelope sentinels and endless sage
Trailing dust into unsettling emptiness—
Yet again through this house like a mountain stream
chatter has run down the pine-framed vistas
each landing’s distinctive prospect of Tahoe
pressed flat by early August heat
a woman tills
the earth
forever her
shoulders never