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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.
The Great Ganesh Milk Miracle
The news of the Great Ganesh Milk Miracle was dissected in every newspaper and every household. No one could talk of anything else.
Wild At Heart: QAnon, Sex Trafficking, and Evangelical Masculinity
The connection between spirituality and child trafficking may be new in New Age spirituality, but it is one that has been common for years within evangelicalism.
11 Questions: IRL by Chris Stedman
IRL takes the shame out of our dependence on the internet and helps us imagine new kinds of consolation and community for a fragmented and sometimes lonely world.
11 Questions: Beyond the Synagogue by Rachel B. Gross
Rachel B. Gross’s engrossing new book looks “beyond the synagogue” to find religious practice in museums, restaurants, and children’s books. Through years of wide-ranging travel, conversations, and reading, Rachel has written a book that has so much to tell us not just about Jewish experiences and identities in the US but about what nostalgia is…
11 Questions: The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
“My mother made a peach cobbler so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.”
To Breathe for A Spell
I have never been more aware of my breath, of the simple act of breathing, than I have in this last year. The ability to inhale air and exhale carbon dioxide and other gases is a bodily function I rarely give thought to.
America: a Polemic
I saw you at the Capitol on video, wild, gleeful in your unthinking symbolism and window-breaking.
The Naked Game
Betsy told me to play the husband. I said yes, but I didn’t want to—in the Naked Game no one ever played the boy—we were just girls, being ourselves.
Who Is My Neighbor?
The whole country, the whole world, is facing a damp, drizzly November of the soul.
“There is light and there is love in this world”: An Interview with Martha Hennessy
When I spoke with Martha Hennessy, she was at her Vermont farm, waiting to be sentenced as she faces over twenty years in prison. She and six other Catholics entered Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia on April 4, 2018 to symbolically disarm the Trident submarines there, each of which can carry 5,760 times the…
On Waiting
I am an expert on waiting. That doesn’t mean I’m good at it. On Twitter last night, Ibram X Kendi sagely compared his election feelings to the ones he had before cancer surgery. It’s true: very similar. Very life or death. But this morning, I can’t stop thinking about scans. Scans loom on the horizon…