During Molly McCully Brown’s tenure as editor in chief, we’re developing loosely themed issues that highlight connections across pieces and genres. In her editorial, she writes: “Together, much of the work in this issue constructs a kind of taxonomy of grief and grieving. Not a hierarchy of suffering, but a tapestry of how we live carrying the inevitable knowledge of loss: beloveds gone and estranged; marriages frayed at the seams until they disintegrate; species dwindling; death witnessed up close and at a distance in newspaper headlines; of our own mortality, increasingly concrete.”

• Fiction by Andrew Porter on observing a family member’s Parkinson’s
• Indira Urrutia Zúñiga on growing up under dictatorship and her art installations of tears knit from metal fibers
• Christian de Boschnek on using shadows as an art medium
• A conversation with essayist Martha Park on apocalypse, motherhood, climate grief, and returning to church
• Ashleigh Elser on how birds mourn
• Rhody Walker-Lenow on visiting the Ark Encounter
• Terry Nguyen on conversion stories as comfort reads
• Jane Scharl on Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations as a religious novel
• Poems by Sandra Lim, Christopher Nelson, and the late Martha Silano, who is greatly missed

On the cover: Martha Park. Roseate Spoonbill, 2024.