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The Baptisms on Pentecost

By Andrew JohnsonJuly 26, 2017

Our guests at the baptism on Sunday agreed, all of our friends and family, many of whom simply don’t care for church or really can’t stand church or usually wouldn’t be caught dead in a church, but all of them, all of them agreed: Yes, what a beautiful cathedral, and wasn’t the choir amazing, and…

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Your Attention, Please

By Gregory WolfeJuly 12, 2017

Dear Friends: I received two emails recently from writers you likely know and admire. Like clockwork, I can expect an email from Annie Dillard a week after each new issue is published. Her response to issue #92 arrived right on schedule: “This is the best Image ever published. These writers stun me.” Then, the day after…

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Passover and Government Presence

By Richard ChessMay 1, 2017

“In what ways do you experience the presence of government—city, county, state, federal—in your life, your daily life, your professional life?” That’s how we began, with that question. Asking questions, that’s the practice, isn’t it, that leads to liberation? And that’s why we were there that night, wasn’t it, to recount an experience of liberation…

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Share If You Agree

By Caroline LangstonMarch 30, 2017

I have had it with the rage. It might drive me off social media. At first, I thought it might just be a problem of living in metropolitan Washington, D.C., where the strident opinions held by many are usually interlinked with what they do for a living. No such luck, though: I’ve been on trips…

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The Song of the Desert

By Christiana N. PetersonFebruary 7, 2017

“The Word of God which is his comfort is also his distress. The liturgy, which is his joy and which reveals to him the glory of God, cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread. Alleluia is the song of the desert.” —Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer When the hospice…

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The Next Abraham

By Richard ChessJanuary 30, 2017

A few days ago, I was blessed to be present at my grandson Abraham’s bris, his ritual circumcision. The mohel, the rabbi who officiated at and performed the circumcision, explained to the family and friends gathered for the ceremony, explained that a bris is the way God signs God’s name on a Jewish male baby.…

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Poetry Friday: “Sister Storm”

By Jeanne Murray WalkerJanuary 20, 2017

I love the drama of this poem. Its title recalls St. Francis’s “Canticle of Brother Sun,” where Francis praises God through “Sister Moon,” “Brother Fire,” “Sister Water,” and so on. Jeanne Murray Walker’s Sister Storm, however, is violent and destructive—definitely not, in the poet’s view, an element through which to praise God. The poet talks…

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I Miss Gwen Ifill

By Caroline LangstonDecember 19, 2016

For Kate Keplinger It is the blight man was born for It is Margaret that you mourn for… —“Spring and Fall,” Gerard Manley Hopkins “I’m sorry for your loss,” my friend Dionne posted in response to a note I posted on Facebook. I’d just come back on the redeye from the West Coast that morning, and…

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Good Letters Is My Devotional

By Cathy WarnerDecember 1, 2016

I came to Christianity in my mid-twenties and joined a Protestant church whose denominational arm publishes devotional booklets that called to mind the copies of Watchtowers Jehovah’s Witnesses used to foist on me. As a new believer, I was supposed to develop a disciplined spiritual life, the cornerstone being morning devotions: Rise at dawn, open…

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A Farmer’s Lament

By Christiana N. PetersonNovember 29, 2016

Last weekend, I cooked lunch for three farmers. One of them was my husband. The other two were a couple who were being forced to close down the small organic vegetable farm they’d been building together for nearly a decade. I could see the loss in their weary smiles, in the holes in their clothes,…

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