More on: Essays

The American self contains multitudes: believers, unbelievers, the proudly heterodox, the meekly agnostic, conscientious objectors, freethinkers, vegans, and still other varieties of spiritual aspirant too obscure or holy to name. In this country’s perpetual adolescence, it can feel impossible to bring these ways of being together into a single whole . . .

I don’t exist independently of the world around me, that all the boundary lines I like to think keep me separate from others are in some sense imagined and temporally bound. I can’t exist without others. And I may not be the hero of my story.  

Nomadic art in Mongolia naturally tends toward the spiritual, toward nature and one’s connection with it. Where some painters might want to incorporate shamanistic elements, these evangelical artists say the country’s Christian roots provide more than enough connection to God.

Sometimes, to comfort myself, I think of myself as a city, not a woman, but a city that can be rebuilt again.

Of course complicating considerations can occur with the immaterial, too, as you might be into time and gravity but not augury or angels—or you might be into some angels, like the six-winged amber ones, but not the messenger of death.

What I lost in my exit from a fundamentalist faith movement, I found inside the closed chamber of my camera.

What is more frightening: that God does not exist, or that God offers us no comfort?

The dead who walk the streets might be a relic of the past, something your Sicilian grandma might tell you about, but the Sanctuary of the Souls of the Beheaded is very much alive.

Chaplaincy was magnificent, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

The loneliness of the dead. How they are isolated by what they know about themselves and about us.