The Opposite of Melancholia
By Essay Issue 120
Anna was an atheist until one month ago. Now she wants to become a nun.
Read MoreThe Open-Armed, Beckoning Embrace
By Essay Issue 120
In much the same way as acute myocardial infarction becomes the final fatal symptom of coronary artery disease, my daughter’s leap from the Golden Gate Bridge was the final fatal symptom of the depression, the melancholia, the psychological distress she’d suffered from most of her life.
Read MoreCrackers
By Essay Issue 120
I am most excited about the exotic delight of oyster crackers, a delicacy I’ve eaten only in this basement at the annual Hebron Lutheran Church Oyster Supper.
Read MoreJohn Moreland’s Hard-Earned Gospel
By Culture Issue 120
Though Moreland does not subscribe to any traditional faith system, his music is suffused with Christian imagery and with a palpable, unorthodox longing for transcendence.
Read MoreVoice as Vocation: The Psalms of Diane Glancy and Julia Fiedorczuk
By Culture Issue 120
These recent books of psalms by Diane Glancy and Julia Fiedorczuk remind us that voices put us in the generative space of the shared, the relational; they engage us in a place of self and other, self and world, self and self.
Read MoreThe Pricking of Love
By Essay Issue 120
Anyone in love is insane.
Read MoreStories to Think With: Fiction as a Mode of Inquiry
By Culture Issue 119
Clarice Lispector. The Complete Stories. Translated by Katrina Dodson. Edited by Benjamin Moser. New Directions, 2015. Kevin McIlvoy. Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, and Found Novels. WTAW Press, 2023. Alva Noë. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. Hill and Wang, 2015. HOW TO BEAR HAPPINESS?” That’s the question a character identified only as “Number…
Read MoreMidsummer Vigil
By Essay Issue 119
Now these voices hover around the belfry and bellow out Pray every day that you’ll see things.
I have. I’ve worked and watched. This was not the answer I wanted.
Shamtastic
By Culture Issue 119
Sham is subtractive, but I, a being, am aggregate. Creation is aggregate. Human creativity is, in its deepest dynamics, aggregate and productive. Let us ornament ourselves, yes, but not toward the end of erasure. Let our adornments extend our penumbrae, our enveloping souls, into the ether that melts into heaven, stacking glory upon glory as cell and organ, skin and fur, aura and crown, radiate the Life that animates all.
Read MoreRevision
By Essay Issue 119
Finally, you add a layer of cookies, and—voila!—a chessboard. Then you let the whole thing sit in the refrigerator until the cookies get soft, and, oh, sweet Jesus, it is so gloriously rich, so simple but so good, like the very best things about Appalachia, sweet iced tea and ghost fireflies and steep, winding roads leading nowhere in particular and everywhere all at once
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