mag
The Balm of Proximity: Churchyard Haunting Past, Pandemic and Potential
If a religious building is in itself a threshold…what possibilities are uniquely latent in the threshold’s threshold…what wisdom lies on the church steps, in the side alley, in the far corner of the graveyard, on the margins, and nowhere else?
Flowers for Fireworks
The Highland Park I knew blurs with the Highland Park that so recently was, and yet the memorials that frame the ends of this street reveal the Highland Park that we will yet be.
Plague Psalm 19
Bees needle our sin-stung flesh in your hive
Yet some kind of sweetness
still touches the tongue.
What Wondrous Love Is This: Finding Queer Religion in Muncie, Indiana
We expected to hear about shared experiences of homophobia and isolation, but much to our joy and surprise, we have also heard, time and time again, about how our narrators have found and cultivated communities that affirm the lives of queer people.
On Gratitude
But there was love, love, love,
dripping from our hands.
We both gripped the sharp edge,
and it was painful
Two Poems by Joe Gross
Sometimes
multiplication
of loaves
just means
splitting
one loaf
between
two people.
Poems for the Cruelest Month
All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all.
All in the Name of God: The Multibillion Dollar Troubled Teen Industry and the Christians Who Profit from It
All across our country, there are “homes” for wayward and rebellious children and teens. I was one of the fortunate who didn’t get sent away, but countless others can’t say the same.
Embering
What to do with this grief over what happened to you? I don’t know, so I’m making a ritual.
Baptism
The still surface lifted by morning fog
as if a bed sheet
that I’m beneath, in the silt, hair reaching,
skin frog-throat white
Five-Foot, Fifty-Dollar Green Beauty
The sight of your friends’ faces illuminated by hot light, standing in a circle as flames leap into the air, as needles crackle and burst, as sparks fly, this image will stay with you. This moment feels holy.
Our Daily Bread and Roses – An Interview with Ben Wildflower
About three or four years ago, I began to see a strange, arresting, and beautiful image circulate among some of my Twitter and Facebook friends—a stark white and black agit-prop expressivist engraving of the Virgin Mary with a defiant fist raised in the air while she stomps on a twisted Satanic serpent, encircled by a cartouche inscribed with a variation from the Magnificat.
11 Questions: Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology by Ed Simon
Unnerving, uncanny, unsettling.
Days Like Dominoes
My thoughts these days are fraught, frazzled little things still precious even though they are as clumsy and malleable as the playdough jewels my daughter likes to shape.
