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.

On my second day at the abbey, I bounced around, trying to listen, to feel, to be in the moment like Carmen advised. It was a tough slog. “Waste time. Waste time,” I told myself, checking my watch. At lunch with the brothers, I casually mentioned that I was in the RCIA (Rite of Christian…

In the middle of life, I fell in love. For my forty-ninth birthday, my wife Lauren gave me a three-day visit by myself at a monastery in South Texas. I went there simply to read for a while and relax. I wasn’t a believer in much of anything, I wasn’t religious, and while I was…

This post appears as the Editorial Statement in Image issue 92. When The Kingdom landed on my desk with a thud, I could tell that it would pose a challenge—that it would be a book I had to contend with. In addition to being a substantial tome, it comes with the cultural imprimatur conveyed by its…