Articles

The Lord is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works.                                               —Psalm 145:9 IN THE AUTUMN OF 1854, in the village of Grezhiv, in what was then known…

is holy, molten in its calcium cup, sun and moon mixed, hot in its prison, cells’ incentive to fuse firing, no second to loiter, calling now to a predator’s jaw. How the genetic vow is kept. Jellied not-yet, hard as thought becoming belief, little o in hope or love, un- umbilical one, cast into air,…

In creased coat, body beggar-curled, colored not the sky blue of Christ’s robe on the mount, nor his mother’s in the manger before she was haloed forever, but a bruising blue, indigo as blood trapped beneath flesh. What the drowned last see, sunk past light’s reach.      

Sentient, it seemed, the snowflakes’ descent, making a midair lake, hovering in the somewhere between weakness and ghost, careless as orchids after Christmas. Beyond the veil of a twelfth-century statue, one congregant took off his Reeboks to pray more ardently in the aisle. The monks were in agreement, voice-wise, with the twilight, the work of…

Content warning: this story includes a depiction of sexual violence. SALIM PEERS THROUGH the peephole in the men’s room in Temple B’nai Moshe and sees two girls standing side by side at the row of sinks in the ladies’ bathroom. One is tall and slim with golden hair that cups her scalp like a swim…

IN LATE OCTOBER I started painting the trim around the outside of the windows white. I finished the east and south sides of the house and moved my ladder to the west. The red leaves were falling from the sugar maple and the buckeyes from the buckeye tree, and the squirrels were making their strangely…

Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother, Kate Hennessy (Scribner, 2017) My Utmost: A Devotional Memoir, Macy Halford (Knopf, 2017) Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli. (Coffee House Press, 2017) ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, RELIGIOUS FOLKS—those of us trying to love our neighbor…

GROWING UP AS I DID amidst the dazzling lights of New York City, it is strange that even as a small child I was madly in love with the stars. The city’s glare effectively canceled out the night sky, admitting only the rare glimpse of the brightest heavenly orbs. Beyond the moon and Venus, you’d…

Under this skylight many lost things are visible. I see the mighty black and yellow spiders in the iris beds by the old garage and feel not a shred of fear. I could husk two dozen sticky ears of sweet corn and pick two quarts of strawberries on my achy knees without whining once. I…

1. When my unemployed faith reappeared as boredom, it seemed a diplomatic triumph. But just about then animals began to intercept me in my wanderings. I grew more and more susceptible to their solicitations. Trees are probably fearless, but the forest should have known better than to show off like that. We had long known…