It is Martin Luther King Day, and I muse about how my relation to African-Americans has been shaped over the years. When I was a child, my father would sometimes take me into work with him on Saturdays. He was a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he ran a research lab (with…

On a November evening last year, I walked to my rosemaling class and sat around a table of women. We represented a wide range of ages and backgrounds, but we were all raised with rosemaling—breadboards and spoons and carved horses and Välkommen plaques all made of basswood. We were all trying to invoke the people…

Continued from yesterday. 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. I asked Winner about her…

I read through the article breathlessly, astonished at the moral implications of what I was learning. When I got to the end, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to begin to take in the import of what I’d just read. The article was “The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb,” by Thomas Powers,…

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. —1 Corinthians 13: 1 My four-year-old enthusiastically agreed to another term of gymnastics with the parks and rec department. He’s not particularly athletic, but he enjoys climbing over obstacles,…

I hate this country I love. —Gretel, “Turn the Lights Back On” I’ve never really thought to see if any other Mississippians feel this way, but whenever anyone not from here criticizes the South in general or Mississippi in particular, I tend to become not so much defensive as rabid and accusatory. Case in point,…