More on: Jesus Christ

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…

You say you will never forsake us then send a horse the color of decaying flesh to wipe out a fourth of the earth. God does not will woe, the pastor says. Disaster unfolds from our own misdeeds. We sing, lift hands. The drummer kicks out mercy and grace. But I still see the horse…

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…

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…

She is a mother first—in every church she lights a candle for her harrowed son. One already lit supplies the match. Today San Stefano, above her stretched a heaven of dark keel vaulting. Here an icon, Byzantine, true presence in the church of the second Eve, the mother she beseeches. She gives a euro to…

Psalm Ghazal I   Touch the cheek of a child and God comes in through the fingers. Open your mouth, and the devil comes in or the devil goes out. Flatter with your tongue the wine and then the hollow inside my hip. At the request of your lips, my mourning turns to dancing. Only…