More on: Essays

The following is excerpted from Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Inc. The book tells the story of the author’s series of pilgrimages to communities that integrate religious practice, love for place, and the production of food, including Pentecostal coffee roasters in Washington…

An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil   I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…

IT SEEMS TO ME, who have never held a brush in my life except to dip it in a bucket of house paint, that a good reason to become a painter, aside from the enduring mystery of beauty, is to learn how to see. And painters do indeed spend an inordinate amount of time in…

I think it is beautiful to be justified (historically). ———Anselm Kiefer Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. ———Hannah Arendt   ANSELM KIEFER is one of the few artists working today who have transcended the vicissitudes and fashions of the contemporary art world. His stature among artists working after World…

Going through the experience of Hurricane Katrina taught me to submit to and praise God. The message I got is that we are hopeless, but we still thanked God in the midst of it. Some people can’t fathom how to sing and praise him in the midst of Katrina. That is where I pulled all…

IT HAPPENED FOR ME in seventh-grade English class. My teacher, Mr. Taussig, was an older gentleman. He had driven a tank in the Battle of the Bulge, which feat of courage helped to offset the fact that he looked like Mr. Magoo. For many months he dragged us line by line through Shakespeare’s Romeo and…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 3, 2013. OUR THEME FOR THIS residency has been comedy. As we’ve discovered, it’s a difficult topic precisely because we think we know all about it already. A number of truisms trip…

I’M WAITING for the 6:40 am train to take me to Boston. It’s a forty-five minute ride that I use to read “inspirational” works. What’s inspirational? Anything that helps get me through the day with some kind of inner peace, with a sense that what I’m doing is worthwhile. I take a deep breath as…

Somebody said, “Lift that bale.” THE EPIGRAPH to Leonard Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers, is attributed to “Ray Charles singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’” Not to Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the lyrics, but to one of the song’s many singers. This was back when Cohen was known primarily as a novelist and poet, before he had performed…