Issue 84

Some of the things I was not doing at the age of twenty-two: learning the Latin names of flowers (or even their English ones) living abroad recording music with the intensity & abandon you hear on every single cut of At Last! on which Riley Hampton’s orchestra’s a tame & obliging brook under storm-spew’d sheets…

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…

Do not make me one of the trees bowing in soft wind, not the heavy branches at sway or the murmuring leaves. But let me be a molecule of water flowing in the veins, the inner blood pressured through the rings. Nothing so grand as ocean waves crumbling on a beach, or the river running…

The following excerpt is taken from Chris Hoke’s new memoir, Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders, published this month by HarperOne. FOR SOME TIME I’VE IMAGINED all of us having a fragile nerve inside of us, like a spiritual antenna deep within our core. Some people, I’ve thought, simply have…

A silver thread pierces my hand, Gleams in lamplight, my fingers flexing there, The needle plunging into bleeding skin, Making a high-pitched, silver sound Becoming words shining in the flame that they create. Tarnished words converge into beginnings, Flame and words, beginnings In moonlight, fairy rings, clouds across the sky Entering a sentence that began…

Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…

The following is excerpted from Lauren Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, published this spring by HarperOne. Each chapter explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay.   IT WOULD NOT BE a gross exaggeration to say…

The angel has always been a strong metaphor to me, raising questions about life, death, and our timeless vulnerability. —Marcel Marceau   I am a Jew. My father died at Auschwitz. By 1938, the sorrows had begun. My name, Mangel, put me at risk. So I applied Marceau like blanching agent that stung at first,…

Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…