Browse Topics
Christianity
Losing Our Religion
Molly Worthen On The Modern Search For Meaning
It seems every year a new survey comes out in which the category of “no religious affiliation” grows larger and larger. A small portion of those people embrace the label atheist or agnostic, but the vast majority don’t, and some would say the phrase “spiritual but not religious” applies to them.
March 2023
How To Be A Woman
I learned a woman could wield the power to turn heads. She could capture a room’s attention and make everyone laugh. Everything else I knew of women’s lives told me not to trust this kind of power, but I wanted it nonetheless.
March 2023
Sins Of The Mother
Although I still identify as a Christian, I am endlessly unpacking and discarding the church teachings of my childhood. My belief in God is no longer built on the fear of what will happen to me after I die.
January 2023
Siri Tells A Joke
My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he wasn’t.
June 2022
Saved
It was true what Mrs. Berry said: no one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a red and black Mustang convertible with a scooped hood and an engine that ran with a throaty hum.
March 2022
The Desert Within
Douglas Christie On The Power Of Silence And Contemplation
There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.
December 2021
Reading From The Desert Fathers At The Laundromat
A certain brother went to Abbot Moses and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
December 2021Invitation
Maybe I write because I want visibility and invisibility, each on my own terms. I want you to accept these paragraphs as photographs from my mind, and I want these photographs to tell you something useful about me. Yet I don’t want you to see me.
September 2021
Earth Perfected
But then I accidentally bite into one of the sour, acrid parts of quarantine. It’s easy to forget, when you live four hundred miles away, that your mother’s temper can be sparked by something as benign as family movie night or a run-in with the Hertz rental-car dealership.
July 2021My Brother’s Dinner With The President Of Sears
After this friend left, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I shut the door and fell to my knees, shaking and crying. I wished that my brother had been different. And I wished that I had been more forgiving and compassionate. I wished that everything between us had been different. I was on that floor for a while.
July 2021
