Where Even Shadows Hum
By Culture Issue 126
Sill pieced together from sources as diverse as Gene Autry and Jung’s closet gnosticism. Reviving her music is our nekyia too—a way to listen to the cultural shadows that emerged in the seventies and still haunt us.
Read MoreUnquenchable Fire: The Road as a Graphic Novel
By Culture Issue 126
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…
Read MoreThis Pillar of Cloud
By Essay Issue 126
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,…
Read MoreThe Leaf Rake
By Essay Issue 126
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?
Read MoreThe Desire That Draws Us
By Essay Issue 126
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.
Read MoreBlessing: Firefly That Says
By Essay Issue 126
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.
Read MoreTriptych
By Essay Issue 126
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.
Read MoreThe Moving Statue: Vinson Cunningham’s Novel of the Fixed and Fleeting
By Culture Issue 125
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.
Read MoreFraying at the Seams: Conversion Stories as Comfort Reads
By Culture Issue 125
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.
Read MoreMissing Parts
By Essay Issue 125
As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter.
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