Articles

The angel has always been a strong metaphor to me, raising questions about life, death, and our timeless vulnerability. —Marcel Marceau   I am a Jew. My father died at Auschwitz. By 1938, the sorrows had begun. My name, Mangel, put me at risk. So I applied Marceau like blanching agent that stung at first,…

Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

The following is part of a book-length collection of poems on the life of Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), a French Catholic religious and priest who lived among the Tuareg people in the Algerian Sahara and whose writings inspired the founding of the Little Brothers of Jesus.   1897–98: Palestine   Remover of rough stones that rise from her flowerbeds, herbalist who thins…

The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…

THEY STOPPED BINDING YOU a while ago, probably because they think you won’t try anything, that you’re too far gone now. You think they’re right. The only time they still use the blindfold is when they do their thing, when they make shallow cuts in your chest and upper arms and thighs, their laughter razor…

Revelation 2:1–7 1. Here’s where a thing gets turned on its head in the mind of a man self-named a sinner. He deciphers inscriptions on gates to the agora: Son of Caesar. Lord. High Priest. Titles claimed by VIPS of empire: Divinity a thing to be grasped at. Gloated on. Devotion wrought by drawn swords,…

Revelation 3:1–6 Not much is left of this fourth-century stone church barnacled to the broken temple honoring the goddess Artemis. And this early synagogue partly restored. Moonlight dissolves the acropolis. The apostle drifts—a shadow, a ghost—past Roman baths, fragmented capitals of pillars, pagan altars. Past a gymnasium. His sandals tattered, old cloak stained. He is scouting…

The children fish off the dock where the minnow-sized ones hover oblivious to the hook jutting from the badly threaded worm. The water’s clear enough to watch victims gather at the bait. One after the other, hauled in, tallied up, tossed back. When the hook goes deep into the throat, they give the tiny fish…

SINCE ACCIDENTALLY BEING LOCKED inside Carmody’s Used Books, I’ve slept badly. In the mornings I manage a bright if groggy farewell as my husband gives his suit pockets a preflight pat and the kids shrug into school backpacks. Alone, I pour myself more coffee and read—the newspaper, catalogues, reviews in the alternative weekly, passages of…