More on: Essays

The following is excerpted from Lauren Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, published this spring by HarperOne. Each chapter explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay.   IT WOULD NOT BE a gross exaggeration to say…

The following is adapted from a presentation given at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley in January 2015 during a convocation on the topic “Blessed Are You Poor: What Does It Mean to Be a Poor Church for the Poor?”   I SHOULD HAVE TOLD Father Michael Sweeney that if he really…

DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…

IT WAS AN ORDINARY autumn night in suburban Chicago when I received the most disturbing book I have ever read. I was seventeen, slouching in my bedroom making a half-hearted attempt at homework, my sweaty cross-country clothes festering on the floor. My father appeared at the doorway and handed me a yellowed paperback that looked…

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

I RECALL A SUNDAY MORNING when the church lectionary readings included a passage from the prophet Isaiah. The lay reader that morning was a thoughtful, older man dressed in a tasteful gray suit. Standing at the lectern, he opened the Bible and read: At that time Yahweh had spoken through Isaiah son of Amoz. He…

The following essay, in slightly different form, was delivered as a eulogy for Charles Hull Wolfe at his memorial service in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on November 23, 2014.   LIKE MOST EARLY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES, mine are vague and fragmentary, faded snapshots that are probably half-invented, based on things my parents told me and the mind’s hunger…