More on: Essays

Midwestern reticence is respect for the unspeakable, the unknowable. What we do and what is done, to each other, to ourselves. What do you say to the flood, the tower, the burning bush?

Olivia was about as high-Wasp as anyone I’d ever met, with her undergraduate degree from Smith and, before that, her four years at an all-girl’s boarding school in Pennsylvania, where she claimed she’d learned a song called “We Are Anglicans.” She loved to regale us with it when she came over for Shabbat.

The world that we still live very much in the midst of, the illusory rocks that slice us open and the faces made of infinitesimal and untouchable grains that we touch and love with everything we are—this is Jesus on the earth.

I had wagered more than I could afford to lose on the probability that God was a friend to the orphan and a protector of the vulnerable.

All my friends are so busy, and when they’re dying, I’ll have something to give them.

After watching him for a few measures’ time, I walk on. I have no interest in spying. I only look at the things that I am allowed to see from the sidewalk.

India Johnson on artist books, activism, and a queer library collective in Iowa.

I was trying to pray. How I yearned to pray! But I was both fascinated and repelled by this man’s presence.