More on: Essays

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.

I was six when my sister had her first breakdown.

We have never wanted to touch the dead.

My own faith is inextricable from the landscape in which I was taught to believe.