Good Letters
We considered it an act of grace that every child we saw in Barcelona was wailing.
“Glosa” refers to an invented language created as a way for all the world’s speakers to understand each other.
Do we draw on an underlying aquifer of values when we choose where we will live?
Anorexia is both a feat of the flesh and a mystery of the spirit. It is less about the body—far less about the body—than women’s magazines and YA television would have us think.
Stories that offer an easy answer to life’s sorrows may seem soothing so long as we remain privileged, cocooned, unaware of the violence of human history, but stories that leave us troubled and uncertain are the ones we can take with us when we are exiled from this narrow shelter.
Decades ago, in Orange County, California, Jennifer Hawk and Tania Runyan shared a number of high school classes but traveled in different social circles. Tania was scary-nerdy-awkward—E.T. and Laura Ingalls’ lovechild—and Jen was scary-sexy-cool—black eyeliner, skateboards, and bands Tania couldn’t pronounce. But they’ve developed a deep relationship over the years, sharing their lives and their…
Mirren Kessling Mirren Kessling is a British visual artist based between London and Oxfordshire. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2016 with a BFA and has subsequently shown at Modern Art Oxford and Cube Gallery London. Much of Kessling’s practice is directly or tangentially related to the story of…
I intermittently check in with an online social media group interested in the reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. It will seem a fringe concern to some, but I’m rarely in the peak of the bell curve when it comes to such things. The group page offers a mixed bag of links to incisive…
At first sight, the gallery feels stark. When I turned the corner at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts and saw All That Glitters, a solo show by Mandy Cano Villalobos, that was my first impression from a distance: a sterile chill. More shadow than glow; more somber than glitter. But as I inched…
Casey N. Cep is a writer whose work tends towards thoughtfulness, with an eye for stories that are haunted by faith. Her work appears often in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee was recently published by Knopf. Here,…
Good Letters
Regular Contributors
Richard Chess
Joanna Penn Cooper
Brad Fruhauff
Burke Gerstenschlager
Caroline Langston
Morgan Meis
Jeffrey Overstreet
Christiana Peterson
Peggy Rosenthal
Tania Runyan
Brian Volck
For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for our blog. Every week gifted writers offer personal essays that make fresh connections between the world of faith and the world of art. We also publish interviews with artists who inspire and challenge us.