More on: Essays

Manu Larcenet. The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Harry N. Abrams, 2024. A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eight million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at…

THERE IS A STORY I have been trying to tell. At first I began with a metaphor, but it never felt right. I rewrote this metaphor a dozen times or more, unwilling to let it go. The metaphor was both premonition and denial; it was an unconscious attempt to disguise the collapse of my marriage,…

Why did Jesus make the nights here so beautiful, soft to the touch? And did I really have a substitute explanation to offer my son?

As I watched him settle into his seat, I felt the tension in his body almost as if it were my own, as if in his taut shoulders and straight spine he was holding himself rigid against the enormity of desire pressing down on him, as I had at his age.

I offered what I could from my human heart to hers. May you be blessed with protection. May love shine its face on you. May peace turn toward you.

Our Lady of Vladimir’s tears are said to be myrrh. When she weeps, the faithful sop up her myrrh with cotton balls, pocket them, carry them home for the miracles. Sufferers are said to be healed. They speak of a scent that engulfs them, a scent like ten thousand roses.

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.

As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter.