One of America’s most prophetic artistic voices has left us. I am speaking, of course, of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison’s passing last week at the age of 88 years. She was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living American writers. And she is the writer whose voice is…

The Welcome Wagon’s Vito and Monique Auito are known for their endearing, lush, and earnest combination of indie-folk hymns, low-fi pop covers, and often revealing original songs. They sing of the glorious ruins of humanity and the cleansing blood of Jesus, treating both with beauty, grace, and inescapable authenticity. I met with Vito Aiuto—poet, musician…

After years of holding intimate hymn-singing gatherings in their living room, Reverend Vito and Monique Aiuto released Welcome to the Welcome Wagon in 2008; the homespun album was produced by Sufjan Stevens and put out by Stevens’s own Asthmatic Kitty records. The Aiutos, accompanied by Stevens and other friends, called themselves The Welcome Wagon—and their…