Wrestling with Faith and Fear

Our spiritual lives can shape us in ways both profound and surprising—whether we have faith or not. The essays and stories in this month’s issue invite readers to examine their own convictions about faith, fear, and evil. Because they resist easy explanations, these themes have recurred throughout The Sun’s history, revealing how personal conviction emerges not from abstract theological debates but from lived experience: a frightening airplane flight, a child’s struggle with religious indoctrination, a chess game between grandfather and grandson.

The selections below demonstrate that questions of belief are rarely settled once and for all, but instead accompany us throughout our lives, evolving as we do.

Take care and read well,
David Mahaffey, Editorial Director

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hell

By Gillian Kendall February 2002

In this unflinching essay, Kendall traces how her childhood exposure to fundamentalist religion instilled a fear of eternal damnation that persists despite her adult rationality. When her plane experiences engine failure, her immediate prayers reveal the lingering power of early religious conditioning and the complicated relationship between fear and faith.

Fiction

Elson Habib, Playing White, Ponders His First Move

By Brian Doyle November 2011

Doyle’s lyrical story unfolds as a grandfather’s chess instructions become a vehicle for imparting wisdom. Through the gentle cadence of advice about knights, bishops, and rooks, deeper truths emerge about imagination, memory, and the spaces between things—illustrating how faith often resides in the quiet exchanges between generations.

Fiction

The Reverend Clearwater Immler Meets The Devil

By Kay Levine Spencer November 1989

When Reverend Immler encounters the Devil in seemingly ordinary circumstances, Spencer crafts a subversive examination of moral certainty. The confrontation forces the Reverend to reckon with his own convictions as he discovers that evil rarely appears as we expect it to—challenging readers to consider how we recognize and resist temptation in our daily lives.

Poetry

Ode To The God Of Atheists

By Ellen Bass April 2009

Bass’s contemplative poem creates a striking portrait of divinity without doctrine, finding sacred presence in plums that “bloom extravagantly” and “dolphins that stitch sky to sea.” With quiet authority, she reveals a spirituality unburdened by the rituals and demands of organized religion while preserving wonder at existence itself—offering a perspective for those who reject traditional notions of faith.

Readers Write

Praying

By Our Readers April 2007

From a child finding solace during a tornado to an incarcerated man questioning his supplications, these personal accounts reveal prayer as wildly diverse yet universally human. Spanning religious traditions and circumstances, these brief testimonials show how the act of prayer—whether performed in desperation, gratitude, or doubt—connects us to something beyond ourselves, even when we’re uncertain what lies there.