More on: Essays

  New Plymouth   WHAT DROVE SUCH PILGRIMS across the sea of southern Idaho, dry plain, sage and antelope? Doesn’t any place hold God, smooth stones to pillow dreams of angels, one rock fitted upon another, raising the pilgrim’s testament: I have come as far as here? How did the displaced, one by one, know…

The Yoke of Sympathy: The Fiction Writer and Her Characters   Although the general tone of your [story] “Kirilka” is well maintained, it is spoiled by the character of the land captain. Keep away from depicting land captains. Nothing is easier than to describe unsympathetic officialdom, and although there are readers who will lap it…

The following excerpt is from The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray, published this spring by Harmony Books, a division of Random House. © 2007 by Lindsey Crittenden. THE SUN was relentless, unrepentant, glaring through the side window of my little Honda as it lurched through commuter-clotted Friday traffic. It was a…

The recent controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture—which touched on the nature of human reason, but which also questioned, in passing, the relationship between faith and reason in Islam—may turn out to be more productive than was at first thought. Among other things, it generated a substantive open letter to the pope signed by…

MY ATTENTION WANDERED from the closely printed pages of my first Bible, inscribed for darling Thomas from Gran April 1943, to its all too few illustrations. This was wartime England, with rationing. The picture pages showed brightly lit scenes of temple worship furnished, as it were, from Harrods. Jesus was turned out in clothes better…

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I found, embedded in one of my parents’ liqueur bottles, a tiny brass wine goblet, a decorative marketing ploy. The toy-like quality of the goblet and the forbidden place I found it made it irresistible to me. I’ve kept it through the years: too small to display but too precious…

AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…