More on: Essays

One of the habits I have developed without meaning to, without wanting to, is this: I routinely lower the volume on my heart.

On my first morning, I read from John’s Gospel, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It felt like a prophecy, the way my life would go. Something I could accept, because it would make meaning.

After fifteen years of marriage, we still can’t go more than two days without having sex. I did the math, and this means we fuck approximately two hundred times per year.

In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors.

ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON, Irmak, Mahmut, and I—three secular Muslim Turks—took refuge in the cool, cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights. Our interest in the Gothic-Romanesque revival church architectural, mostly, we ambled through soaring galleries, admiring arches that shouldered the weight of the building and stained glass of biblical scenes that…

When I introduce myself, they generally reply with a greeting and their names, not that any of us think we will remember the names. But our politeness turns us from strangers into temporary acquaintances.

My belief: that the words are in the world, and that we are consubstantial with the world, that we are immanent along with it, the words become our world.

Grace leaves us wordless. This commonality, though, is what makes the genre of testimony so compelling.

We were at war, Christian soldiers, and on October 31, the war spilled out onto every street in the city, Satan rising, only the truest of saints fighting back.

It was during Holy Week last year when E, wearing her fake Gucci butterfly necklace, tried to light herself on fire.