More on: Essays

In our solemn conversations about the firemen, in our statements of unconditional loyalty and trust, I realize that maybe instead of the moral authority of God in our household, I have given Toby the firemen. Brave and noble, yes, but a shabby substitute for the Almighty.

I have hurt my father two times that I know of.

When I hear my parents’ voices lilt with Midwestern shame, our pernicious lineage, I want to set the bench on fire or bury an axe head into it.

How does this resound in my heart, Lord? Do you hear it? It’s the sound of my shovel hitting those aluminum markers.

It was the season of the prayer for rain. To condense, to cloud, to empty out, to rain. And nothing is familiar but the rain.

It is only the forgetting—of our debts, of our teachers and fellows, of our place in the larger story we are unwittingly writing—that is a sin, a crime against memory, against both past and posterity.

I used to keep my beliefs about hell tucked latent in the hidden place. After Joe died, they began to eat at their cupboard, like moths in a sweater drawer.

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.