Once upon a time I thought belonging just happened, was angry or ashamed when I couldn’t experience it. But togetherness happens with practice and intention. It takes everything: pain, grief, rage, as well as my good intentions. This is even more evident now: though physically distanced from my church, I feel less alone in the body of Christ than I ever have before.

Poet Molly McCully Brown’s prizewinning first collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is about a real, state-run residential hospital for people with serious mental and physical disabilities that was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. If she’d been born in another time, Molly Brown might have been a patient at the Virginia Colony.

A new commitment to noticing and caring for the other is all over i,i, and there are also critiques of those who refuse to do so.

Decades ago, in the faraway land of Orange County, California, Jennifer Hawk and Tania Runyan shared a number of classes but traveled in different social circles. Tania was scary nerdy awkward—E.T. and Laura Ingalls’ lovechild–and Jen was scary sexy cool, black eyeliner, skateboards, and bands Tania couldn’t pronounce. But in the past few years they’ve…