More on: hope

Valle de Viñales, Cuba, 2002 In this valley where limestone hills jut out like hairy moles over furrows of tobacco, a rock-face Christ sprawls on a skew cross, as if a child had taken loose chert to etch his fanged mouth, stick legs, twigged fingers. I touch gouged eyes that weep candle wax, caress his…

What I have come to say is never quite _____sufficient; what I have come to say falls ever short, if reliably—my one, _____my only certainty. This fact, for now, can prove both deep discouragement and deep, _____elusive hope. I’ve come to trust our words’ most modest crapshoot; I have come, as well, _____to see their…

Once in the desert he said he saw the shape of a man, a body, the line around it neither light nor dark standing speechless in his path. That he could feel his shirt draw back against his body his mind was already giving back to fear until the figure turned to yield and let…

I have love And a child, A banjo And shadows. It was the light, always the light. First, that absent early hour when he woke to find the world made strange, knocked awry, as if creation had suddenly undone itself, the landscape dishonored by this loss. The dawn moved haltingly toward day. He would have…

You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…

When he was only four, his mother spoke to him in Latin and a sacrament of Greek, the music of the dead tongues raised up to speak for the root of all. How proud they were, mother and son, bound by rule and the game it made, the bread they broke, word by word, on…

I tell you it’s a bitch existence some Sundays and it’s no good pretending you don’t have to pretend, don’t have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven…

THE SPELLS CAME late that summer and left him bewildered, muttering. He had known this was coming, had felt the tremors in his mind and seen familiar objects—his can of shoe polish and his TV remote—transformed in his hand into strange artifacts. The TV remote he found in his desk, facedown beside the calculator. The…

The New Atheist Novel: Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic after 9/11     by Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate (New Directions, 2010) The Children Act by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese, 2014) Fury by Salman Rushdie (Random House, 2001) The Book Against God by James Wood (Picador, 2004)   HEAVY RHETORIC MIXED WITH biblical exegesis and reductive…

The following excerpt is taken from Chris Hoke’s new memoir, Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders, published this month by HarperOne. FOR SOME TIME I’VE IMAGINED all of us having a fragile nerve inside of us, like a spiritual antenna deep within our core. Some people, I’ve thought, simply have…