Suddenly, just as I was starting to get a little bit comfortable in my role as Brother Morgan in the New Order of Saint Francis at Saint Anthony’s Cathedral, an Ecumenical Catholic Church in Detroit, the children came. No one knows why the children came, and no one asked the children to come. They just…

“The audience doesn’t want to hear you make points,” insists Tracy Morgan in “The Comedian,” the first episode of the rebooted Twilight Zone series helmed by Jordan Peele. He might as well deliver the line with a wink, as that’s what the show has always done: critique human failings, and often, current events, in ways…

Imagine the Gospel narrative taking place right in your home town, right now. How would you know what was going on? How would you react? This is what Tania Runyan imagines with delightful grace in “Before All Things.” In her telling, the key moments in the gospels happen almost simultaneously. First, Christ dies as “a…

Recently at the ancient Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, monks gathered to introduce a new version of an old deity: Mindar, an android embodying Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Standing over six feet tall, most of her body the aluminum skeleton of a robot, bolts and rivets all on view, Mindar is honest about her…

“So who mothers the motherswho tend the hallways of mothers, the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers, who mend the eyes of mothers” –Catherine Barnett, “Chorus” On Easter, I go to my son’s father’s house—Sundays are one of his days—and watch my son enjoy his basket, which I spun from thin air the night…

    Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. He was born into a family of 12 children in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where he grew up speaking Yoruba, Igbo, and English. His first novel, The Fishermen, published in 2015, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was one of the…

We hear it before we see it. Sometimes, it’s the somber snap of the funereal snare. Sometimes, it’s the ladies’ choral recitations of the rosary, scratching through a tinny speaker. Then there they are, processing past our apartment building. It is Good Friday, the day of Christian upheaval and ruined expectations, and in a moment,…

Lord of the hopeless also dear     Hat-Soak Pole-in-the-Canal and Red-Tie Father     Son And Holy Ghost not     in that order break The rottenness of those who torture one Of Thy least wrath-deserving exiles me Not     wholly undeserving     no     but some And isn’t it the some that counts with Thee O     Gondola also as the trees pass…

The cell phone on the conference room table in London buzzed in the middle of the meeting, and the man glanced down at it, mid conversation. “My God,” he said. “They’ve arrested Assange.” A block away, at the Palace of Westminister, protesters on the sidewalk held signs either for or against Brexit: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!…

Angelus Novus by Paul Klee I met Angelus Novus, a Paul Klee image, through Walter Benjamin’s writings, inscribed in his verse like a ghost. Within the binding of his book, like all books, I found my way into another world, a door to Narnia that released me into twentieth century Europe. At the time, Jewish…