More on: faith journey

He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar.                             —Son House on Robert Johnson   In November, it’s hard to know a cherry tree is a cherry tree. If it has any leaves left, they’re raw as rust. The sound the wind makes hustling through them’s a…

Bathrooms are the best locale. All that waste and water and getting clean. Or trains. The nearly equal passengers. A phone rings in the kitchen but no one picks it up. Milk goes bad at room temp. You don’t check your email anymore. Could only scrawl a message: “I____you with all my harm.” Each day…

What became of the nice pagan girl I married? you complained one morning after I’d found my way to the church down the street and kept walking back every Sabbath. Over dinner you’d quiz me on the sermon, argue with the absent preacher, and me if I defended his BS. Maybe you resented any other…

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…

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 angel has always been a strong metaphor to me, raising questions about life, death, and our timeless vulnerability. —Marcel Marceau   I am a Jew. My father died at Auschwitz. By 1938, the sorrows had begun. My name, Mangel, put me at risk. So I applied Marceau like blanching agent that stung at first,…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

Revelation 3:1–6 Not much is left of this fourth-century stone church barnacled to the broken temple honoring the goddess Artemis. And this early synagogue partly restored. Moonlight dissolves the acropolis. The apostle drifts—a shadow, a ghost—past Roman baths, fragmented capitals of pillars, pagan altars. Past a gymnasium. His sandals tattered, old cloak stained. He is scouting…

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…

Down the dark way, the dark way down. Everything dark now, as he has come to see: that the way was always dark, the journey dark, the mind dark, the answers like the questions dark, each day dark, the glaucous pearl white eyes, even when the sun spread across the greengold grass, glistening the bright…