More on: J.C. Scharl

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

First rain in the new house—
walls passed inspection, but
who knows? It’s hard to trust
in bricks. Aren’t they just cut-up

mud, lashed now by spray
from clotted gutters?