Critical discussion of Jesus throughout the modern period has been stumped by a single, crucial question. Anyone who has read the Gospels knows that Jesus was a skilled teacher, a rabbi in the parlance of…
Eden was a winter
when gods skated the earth.
They’d warm themselves by the fires
that lit the man-high snowbanks
Once upon a time, down Mexico way—actually down in San Diego in 1988—an unsuspecting editor from Doubleday offered me a contract to write a book on the historical Jesus for the Anchor Bible Reference Library…
for Shelley Turley
When trouble—an earthquake, a heart—
Comes to town, breaking dams,
Leveling shops, clubs
I hear the fist-sized heart
cannon in the fog of rhythm
death and future.
From it I take the few things
I told Darcy I’d meet her here. Right here. I can’t say where here is. I’ve made promises. We’re going to grab a bite to eat. You wouldn’t know to eat here. It’s on the…
Mom moved up to Santa Barbara, and Dad started having girlfriends over. Ladyfriends, he called them. When I stayed home sick from school, I saw the ladyfriends leave for work. “How cute. Is this yours?”…
Locking the door to the bath,
opens the collar of the shirt,
raises chin, fingers buttons
from their holes, lengthens torso,
molts like a snake.
In a 1991 New York Times Book Review article, African-American literary theorist and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., used the bizarre case of The Education of Little Tree to reexamine the issues of “identity” and “authenticity” in literary studies.
Custom/culture; sacred/profane; vision/imagination; literal/figurative—call them borderlands, call them crossroads—we catch glimpses of possibility and more fully understand the limits of our faith in these places. And the place where “Mormon” crosses “literature” looks like the…