On the day after Thanksgiving my dad would disappear into the attic while I waited at the foot of the ladder for him to bring them down. One by one, I wiped the dust from their crowns. We had the full set in faded plastic, melted in spots from summer storage in the Louisiana heat:…

This post is adapted from the introduction to Joel’s new book, Sects, Love, Rock and Roll, available now from Cascade Books. I tried not to write a book about Christian rock. I tried fiction, but gave up after a teacher couldn’t get me to fix the ending to the story where a seventeen-year-old kid loses…

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—Walden Media’s third Narnia movie—portrays one of the fiercest battles you’re ever likely to see at the movies. I’m not talking about blades and arrows (although even C. S. Lewis would be alarmed at how much violence occurs in big-screen Narnia). No, I’m talking about wars…

Here in central Maine, the world has come down to bone. The songbirds are gone and crows, which poet Mary Oliver terms “the deep muscle of the world,” have taken over my street. The landscape seems empty; the ground, a carpet of desiccated leaves. One longs for the blanketing stillness of snow. The world, dark…

Each bright new weekday morning, I rustle the children into the car, pick up another neighborhood child, then drive across three ragged D.C. suburbs—past liquor stores, pawnshops, and storefront churches—to the crumbling eighty-year old former parochial school building that houses Christian Family Montessori School. It’s Rhode Island Avenue and busy, so parents park carefully, then…

It’s Thanksgiving evening, 2005. And even though this is your last chance to see us, you can barely look. But this is nothing unusual. You’ve always had trouble seeing us, your daughters who, in spite of you, are here. The hospital is deserted, as if no one else in the city is dying today. Instead,…

Religion enlarges the God and limits man, telling the believer incessantly to remember his limits. —John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder I must confess something. I don’t know enough about Calvinism to decide if the fact that I am utterly shaped by it—through my lifelong exposure to Presbyterianism, through my Southernness, through my Scotch-Irish Protestant…

Having lived all my life in the Northeast, I associate the liturgical seasons with certain weather. Advent is snow-blown and dark, as is Christmas. Ash Wednesday ranges from hard-packed ice to melting-snow mud; Easter ranges from the chilly beginning of brightness to sunny warmth and the first green shoots. Wintering this year in southern Arizona,…

When I was growing up, every Thanksgiving weekend, my grandfather took the whole family—two sets of aunts and uncles, my parents, my brother, and me—to Carmel-by-the-Sea. We stayed in the same old rambling hotel with the Mexican-tiled grand staircase and the upstairs hall carpeted in a pattern of cabbage roses perfect for playing hopscotch. We…

In Rio de Janiero, there’s a saying that even Jesus turns his back on the poor. In a way it’s true. Early in Lucy Walker’s documentary Waste Land, a helicopter carries us around Christ the Redeemer, a white statue towering over Rio, arms outstretched embracing the wealthy of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Behind it, we…