My first “Hallelujah” was sung by Rufus Wainwright in Shrek. I was a preteen and baffled that my grown siblings were interested in the soundtrack. The lyrics were deceptively simple words, referencing biblical passages I recognized. I knew it was Dovid who saw Batsheva bathing on the roof; I knew it was Delila who cut…

By now, I could have read Psalm 27 at least twenty-seven times, once a day for the past twenty-seven days. I could have participated in communal prayer on Shabbat morning three times during this month: Elul. Regular prayer—a practice that may create conditions in which the worshipper can see herself as she is seen by…

The Emmys air tonight, and here at “Good Letters” we’re gratified that our bloggers have written about some of this year’s nominees: This Is Us. “Beginning its third season, the Emmy-nominated NBC drama devotes serious time to exploring the emotional complexities of relationships among adoptive and biological families,” writes Tania Runyan, who added to her…

The Americans, FX’s drama about Russian spies living in Washington, D.C., ended its six-season run on May 30. After season five, I wrote in “An American Body Politic” about how deception corrupts various kinds of bodies (national, personal, marital) because intimacy cannot abide it. In one plotline during this final season, spy Elizabeth Jennings goes…

My annual family Christmas letter swelled from a single paragraph into a sixteen-page spread before I finally admitted at age thirty-seven—to myself, more than anyone else—that I wanted to be a writer, a desire that’d been brewing during a decade as a fulltime wife, mother, and dedicated church volunteer. I hadn’t always wanted to write.…

In July 2016, I watched season one of Stranger Things with my younger brother. I didn’t encounter a Demogorgon in the small town where we grew up, but I did use walkie-talkies, grow infatuated with girls from school, and roam the neighborhood on my bike. Last fall, I watched season two with my wife, the…

This Is Us. This is Adoption. Open adoption, in which a child’s birth family and adoptive family arrange to have some sort of contact, from sharing basic background information at the time of adoption to writing occasional letters to taking vacations together, has become the norm with domestic adoption. Although the majority of social workers…

My teenage granddaughter Phoebe was visiting us from out of town. On these visits, we always choose a movie for evening viewing. “What about The Wizard of Oz? I think it was the first movie we watched together here, when you were about five,” I suggested at dinner. Phoebe demurred. “The producer did bad things…

On July 24, an orca calf died off the coast of British Columbia within thirty minutes of birth and Tahlequah, the calf’s mother, carried her dead daughter on her rostrum, pushing her through the Salish Sea from Canada to the U.S. and back again in a funeral procession that logged a thousand miles and lasted…

1. The temptation is there. Every time my daughter rubs her elbow against it, the sliver opens underneath like a tomb. I did that. I cut the plastic that covers our table, and through the tablecloth itself. I did it earlier, right before dinner as I was cutting my basted quilt pieces with the rotary…