“We’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got,” sang Ziggy Stardust forty-five years ago. Did people feel a prickling in 1977, as if Bowie might be prophet? It’s not so hard to believe. Do people ever forget to fear burning to death once they’ve imagined burning in their beds, under their desks, in their basements?…

There on my bookcase was a row of nine matching hardbacks. On their spines, a woodcut of an angular man with a pipe and smoking jacket, each volume with its own elaborate Victorian wallpaper-inspired paisley or floral design. I’d found them years ago at a used bookstore: $9.00 for the full Book-of-the-Month Club edition of…

This post originally appeared as a web-exclusive feature accompanying Image issue 84. Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. The chapter excerpted in issue 84 is about bread. I…

This post, which appears as the Editorial Statement in Image issue 90, is continued from yesterday. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a contemporary of Shakespeare, knew his share of failure. As a young man he went off to serve in the military—whether to escape arrest for wounding a man in a duel or for some other…

It has been said that one of the most effective means by which evil can have its way is to convince us that we are too abominable to love. It’s not a bad tactic. When our faults are catalogued back to us, the inventory is hair-raising and earth-shattering. This is one of the methods attributed…

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats’s line, I think vaguely incarnational thoughts: heaven enters earth with Christ’s Incarnation; God dwells within our world, not separated from it; and so on. I believe these statements. Yet these formulations give me nothing to grasp onto, nothing to engage…

One early June, traveling to a wedding in San Diego, I’d taken the long way from Dallas by train. I wanted to see the Southwestern deserts. Two days later Amtrak’s Sunset Limited broke down in the Mojave Desert. Pretty quickly it became clear: We are not so great. Nature is. God is. Perhaps this is…

As of October 18, my fourth novel, How to Save a Life, is officially out in the world. The plot involves a death, a pregnancy, and an adoption. Recently, a fellow writer said he thought it interesting that I, the same person who wrote about not being a mother here at Good Letters, had written a…

As I wrote last year, I know that a novel has me hooked when I start praying for the characters. And such it was again with my recent return to John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. My husband and I listened to the CD of the…