Angelus Novus by Paul Klee I met Angelus Novus, a Paul Klee image, through Walter Benjamin’s writings, inscribed in his verse like a ghost. Within the binding of his book, like all books, I found my way into another world, a door to Narnia that released me into twentieth century Europe. At the time, Jewish…

White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall  It helps to know where you’re going. Few of us ever do. My wife and I had taken the train to Würzburg, Germany, only to learn most of the tourist sites were closed for the day. We decided to make the best of it, taking in what gardens and historic buildings remained open, and…

I live in Minnesota, where the new growing season starts in May. At our house, March and April are our designated months for emptying the freezer, when we try to eat all the produce we froze the summer before. Sautéed spinach, tomato sauce, diced rhubarb, ratatouille, chopped raw onions and bell peppers divvied into one-cup…

If you’re going to make a habit of re-reading novels (as I do), then it helps to have a pretty poor memory (as I do). My re-reading seems to fall into two categories. First there are the novels I’ll re-read every ten years or so. These are the super-long ones that draw me inexorably into…

Does the imagination play a role in spiritual experience, I asked. How about in religious experience? On a Thursday morning late in the semester, a dozen undergraduates–honors students–and I gathered in a circle in the Laurel Forum, a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one wall, another wall all windows opening onto the campus quad. A…

Neither of us are great sightseers, but Bernie, my partner of twenty years, and I couldn’t come to Barcelona without visiting the Sagrada Familia, the modernist cathedral designed by the architect Antoni Gaudi at the turn of the twentieth century. We’d planned the trip to see a soccer game of Barcelona Football Club, a fascination…

I met my husband for the first time on April Fool’s Day twelve years ago. Living several states apart, we were introduced by mutual friends and spent three months corresponding by email and phone. When it was finally feasible for us to meet face-to-face, I planned and worried for weeks, feeling tense with emotional preparation.…

Wearing a hospital gown and blue-paper shorts I ease down, first onto my side, then gingerly onto my back that still protests after a month in response to once innocent movements. The technician slides a bolster under my knees, and warm blanket over them, hands me earplugs and an emergency call button, pushes a button,…

…Christ was never more than a man nailed to across but from him I learned that an entire lifefits into a person’s palm like a book of poemslike an executioner’s hammer now at thirty fiveI have learned confession won’t save me… Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Exiled from the Throne…

A little old man came out of a fabric store and lit a stick of incense. He had a pronounced lower lip, which dangled more than a foot from the bottom of his face. He shook and brandished his wondrous lip and the young men around him trembled and approached. He held his left hand…