More on: prayer

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…

The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism   Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…

Autumn came before I realized.                Sharpness flew up like gull-cries, the swan turned upside down in the water, pulling up grass,                rolling its big hips upward, which made me wonder if words are necessary for pleasure, if                without them, sparkles on the water would be useless baubles. I have so many of…

I chanted Lord’s river during Matins. The psalmist had written Lord’s forever. My mistake, of course, but I like my version better. Christ’s body of skinny, flowing, noisy water reminds me of the creek behind our house in Virginia. I felt him, playing as a boy in the woods. My brothers and I built forts, caught crawdads under…

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…

[John] Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena…. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier—with the same results. The electrons…

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…

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?         by Dave Eggers (Knopf, 2014) High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire (Henry Holt and Co, 2014)   THE WORLD HAS TURNED SMALL in our hands.…