Issue 82

Three Poetry Collections Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press, 2014) Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) F by Franz Wright (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)   IN THE LONG HISTORY of the poetry of religious devotion, one often encounters a guileless representation of the self in its attempts to relate to the divine. The…

Three or four of them congregated outside the sanctuary of the First Baptist   Church in McKenzie, Tennessee, savoring the last cigarette before service, voices low and knowing, a slight rasp-edge to their laughter. Cigarettes would kill you— I was ten years old and could read what it said right on the pack—but ignoring warnings…

Dorothy Day’s Rule of Life: See the face of Christ in the poor. And: journal every day. 1. THE FIRST TIME I saw the buildings, they buzzed. In my evangelical fever I didn’t know if it was electricity, demons, or just the sounds of thousands of souls put in close proximity together. This is where…

So many things to see in this old world But all I can see is you. —“Together Alone,” 1970 The following is excerpted from Bruce Cockburn’s memoir, Rumours of Glory, forthcoming this November from HarperOne.   IN LATE 1966 I WAS INTRODUCED to two people, in very different circumstances, who would have a profound effect…

WHEN I CAME HOME from King’s Chapel on the Sunday I published an article called “Returning to Church” in the New York Times Magazine in 1985, I had a message from Kurt Vonnegut on my answering machine. “This is Kurt,” his voice said. “I forgive you.” My becoming a Christian again in mid-life (after many…

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…

KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives…

Dan Wakefield recently edited a book of the letters of Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he maintained a literary friendship over four decades. Though Vonnegut is often associated with the skepticism and iconoclasm of the sixties and seventies, faith held a mystique for him. At times he called himself a “Christ-loving atheist” and “a Christ-worshipping agnostic.”…

Singer-songwriter David Bazan was frontman of the indie-rock band Pedro the Lion for ten years, recording four albums and five EPs. He has also recorded with side projects including Headphones, Undertow Orchestra, and Overseas. In 2005, Bazan began touring and recording under his own name, starting with the EP Fewer Moving Parts. With Pedro the…

So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…