One of America’s most prophetic artistic voices has left us. I am speaking, of course, of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison’s passing last week at the age of 88 years. She was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living American writers. And she is the writer whose voice is…

In the novel The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into a religious cult. Phoebe Lin is wealthy, beloved, popular, but she’s secretly overcome by grief. She doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Over the course of the book, Phoebe is is…

It happens only once a year, during the High Holidays: a full prostration, human body to the floor. In my congregation, the rabbi, and sometimes the guest cantor hired for the High Holidays, Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, each joined by two congregant-assistants, prostrate themselves fully on the bimah, the platform on which the holy…

When the chicken slaughter began, I wasn’t thinking about mortality or food ethics or my fraught relationship with meat; I was concentrating on not fainting. It happens occasionally—a minor embarrassment in doctor’s offices, hospitals, and, once, a high school English class while I read about the Chinese practice of foot binding.  The summer of the…

“There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his…

Men and women bearing torches chant “blood and soil” as they cross a bridge in Columbus, Ohio. One of the group’s loudest members is Bryon: head-shaved, his body cloaked in tattoos. The torch lights his face, which quickly turns from a smirk to something rabid. Clad head-to-toe in black, he leads the boot-march toward a…

Decades ago, when I was being drawn from atheism through agnosticism toward Christianity, somehow Simone Weil’s writings came into my hands. Literally into my hands: so struck was I by her words that I copied pages and pages of them into my journal. Weil became my spiritual director. She led my spirit to eventually embrace…

Deep beneath layers of digital dust in the archives of my hard drive, an angry bird is waiting, wondering if he’ll ever see me again. Somewhere around 2004, I was in my eighth year of drafting three different novels when a publisher suddenly showed interest in one of them—an epic fantasy—and the other two, both…

In Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel Wise Blood, an itinerant World War II veteran named Hazel Motes is determined to live a life without belief. He’s a preacher, but he preaches the “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.”  Yet, for all Motes’s renouncing, Christ remains. He “moves from tree to tree in the back of…

My daughter is the star of her first music festival: she is nine months old, pink cheeked and fat. We’ve dressed her in a cotton tank-top, a screenprint of a kitten wearing a flower crown. It’s almost too cute, but this is a strategy: I’m hoping that if she’s fussy, festival-goers will find the baby…