More on: relationships

He is, I think, his own angel, or mine, not winged or gifted with a voice of annunciation— Blessed are you of all—or wielding a double-edged sword cleaving evil from the earth’s right angles, but rather a shuffle, stooped and soft-featured as the light from our campus lampposts, their globes a quiet amber behind beveled…

hors d’oeuvres THE HASTILY ASSEMBLED spread on the dining-room table—Pringles, Wheat Thins, a bottle and a half of Merlot, four cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, a bowl of leftover Halloween candy—might be worse than no spread at all. This is one reason the hosts, Wendy and Drew Pike-Stuyvesant, are ashamed of and angry with each…

I DON’T CARE how long you’ve been teaching. Nothing prepares you to handle a fastidious sixteenth-century theologian who wants to write romance novels. A great many questions sprang to mind when John Calvin strode into our classroom that first night. What had he been doing with himself for the past five hundred years? Why a…

AND SO I CAME to Muping and discovered the panda. Yes, I discovered him! I had traveled far and wide through China by then, from the plains to the mountains, from the desert to the sea. I had discovered hundreds of new species of flora and fauna: the butterfly bush and blue corydalis, the small snow finch,…

YOU YOURSELF are a holy mother,” Father Canevin was saying. He was speaking to Miss Dunn’s mother. He sat back in a leather chair that gave a short cough and squeak each time he moved, like an old, brittle bellows. Toom-beeph. Toom-beeph. Miss Dunn listened intensely to such sounds. They were like voices from a…

Morgan Meis blogs about philosophy and art criticism at The Smart Set. His essay “Conversion” in Image Issue 80 takes an oblique approach to his coming into the Catholic Church–it’s at least as much a portrait of the elderly Sri Lankan nun who catechized him as it is a personal essay.    Image: You are a…

JACOB FELT TERRIBLE: he had slept through the whole thing. The ambulance, the EMTs. It had happened at seven in the morning, and his alarm had been set for eight. Was it better or worse that no one else in the hall heard anything either? Mrs. Wilkinson had been taken away, and she had not…

The wires between house and garage could slice you as you fall, ladder a useless set of rungs; the mailbox could impale you, so I implore: no roof chores. When it’s gutter time, I stand beneath the ladder, uncertain anchor. My father, blond child, held his position as ladder-bracer, even when my grandfather threw chunks…

CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…

MY SUMMER WITH SYLVIA was like sighting deer in the woods. You hold your breath, try hard not to spoil it. Suddenly you have nowhere to be, nothing to do. You’re a kid again. It’s hide-and-seek—you’re hiding. Later, if somebody asks how your walk was, what can you say? “I saw a deer,” you say.…