More on: Culture

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

Most days, belief in anything beyond the day before me felt unfathomable. But my disorientation presented me with an opening, a paradoxical invitation to entertain what I would typically have considered beyond the barometer of belief.

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.

In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors.

My belief: that the words are in the world, and that we are consubstantial with the world, that we are immanent along with it, the words become our world.

Grace leaves us wordless. This commonality, though, is what makes the genre of testimony so compelling.

My own faith is inextricable from the landscape in which I was taught to believe.

Though Moreland does not subscribe to any traditional faith system, his music is suffused with Christian imagery and with a palpable, unorthodox longing for transcendence.

These recent books of psalms by Diane Glancy and Julia Fiedorczuk remind us that voices put us in the generative space of the shared, the relational; they engage us in a place of self and other, self and world, self and self.