Have you ever seen The Book of Kells? I mean, really seen it with your own eyes? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more breathtaking work of art. Photographs can’t capture the way light plays across the vibrant, reflective ink. Nineteen years ago I stood in Dublin’s Trinity College and leaned over a glass…

Sixpence None the Richer is my favorite band. I used to be embarrassed to say this, particularly in 1999, when their bouncy pop song “Kiss Me” became a ubiquitous, worldwide radio hit. I knew, and know, that the band was more than this one song, but “Kiss Me” on the radio, in 1999, was the…

My favorite new word came inadvertently and secondhand through my boyfriend’s father earlier this year. Speaking to his brother at their father’s funeral, he asked, “Do you have a tic-tac or something? Cause your breath’s just kind of medium.” The first time Ben relayed this story to me, I laughed so hard the soymilk I…

This post is my first for Good Letters—hi, everyone!—and I’m going to start with something that is small but, I think, important. “Small but important” describes a lot of what I plan to do in this space—describe little moments of religious reflection and representation in film, TV, books, and music, and see if we can…

City living involves carving out paths—the well-worn routes we travel each day. Whether on foot, behind the wheel, or in the seat of a city bus, we come to anticipate the landmarks of daily life. The construction on the house on the corner; the For Sale sign that becomes Sold; the usual panhandlers and Street…

Humanity is readily divisible into two groups: those who divide humanity into groups and those who don’t. The wise—even those among the dividers—learn to hold their tongue among the former. More than matters of taste, the position one takes in intractable arguments reveals something of one’s interior life. Realist or Nominalist, PC or Mac, Whitman…

The Pill’s fiftieth anniversary year is an odd occasion for me, the daughter of young parents who stoked their fiery love affair with accidental babies. Despite the pink plastic nautilus of Pills in our mom’s make-up tray, despite the condoms we found when we looted our dad’s sock drawer for impounded Nintendo controllers, my parents…

So much of Exit Through the Gift Shop is shrouded in mystery. The documentary film’s (purported) creator, Banksy, is an elusive British graffiti artist whose identity is unknown, even though he’s the darling of the international art world who routinely sells screen prints for six figure prices. In his first foray into film, Banksy presents…

On Thursday May 7th at 2:15 am, my wife gave birth to a boy: Alexander Day Griffith, 8 lbs. 8 oz. Alexander is my middle name, so that requires no explanation, but “Day” is unusual, I guess, and so I’ve had many awkward phone calls with family and friends where at some point the person…

All my life I have had fantasies of freeing slaves. I believe I have this fantasy more than most because I was raised in Illinois—Land of Lincoln, home to the Great Emancipator—and came of age in a house with numerous Civil War books, including the ubiquitous Time-Life series of hard back, faux-leather-bound books (though they…