More on: faith practice

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…

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…

Do you want to go back inside? the neighbor asks his small dun dog. Beauty, do you want to go inside? A long look at the tiny fluff, as if speech is imminent. As if anything is imminent. What would help you unpack the boxes? my therapist asks. Love. And I want an authentic relationship…

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…

IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to the Grosses’ my wife says, “I’m just hoping we can get to know some of these people. Like really get to know them.” I nod and she goes on, “And I don’t mean like they are projects, like we are just trying to save them.” I agree with her.…