Christianity

The Good End of Pleasant Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.

Practice Losing Everything

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

The Danish

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

Avium

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

You don’t know what’s with Marjorie, // but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure / worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs / in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings, // you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet / it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly / to be believed. . .

Reason To Believe

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:14 -0400

Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.

Misunderstandings

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Missed calls, misheard lyrics, mistaken identities

I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

lm2534@hotmail.com — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

If you walk the stations of the cross, most tour guides / will politely point out the spot where they think Jesus / may have fallen or the spot where / he may have met his mother.

New Life

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Since I had no one else to ask, I asked the hunger where it wanted to go. It said, West, like that was a point on the map called Freedom. So I drove west. I stopped at a Walmart somewhere in Kansas and bought a propane camp stove and a tent, because hotels were not in the budget.

Sex in the In-Between

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:02:00 -0400

He looked hardy, and, God, I’m a sucker for hardiness. Show me a pocketknife and callused hands, and I’m ready to let you feel me up. His profile had a photo of him holding a giant golden eagle in Mongolia. Looking back, I can see it was partly the eagle I swiped right on.

The Bleeding Woman

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:05:00 -0500

So, Maryam the elder goes on, they arrest Yeshua and some of his followers and bundle them off to our dear high priest, Caiaphas, who decides it’s better for Yeshua to die than to cause problems with the Romans. The high priest is always sucking Roman cock—can’t help himself—so he turns Yeshua over to the governor, lots of bureaucracy, you know how these things go.

Forecasting

adryansky@comcast.net — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:10:00 -0400

November steals light. Its groaning, / overstuffed table force-feeding / December’s mandatory twinkle. Sticky / sugar & shine. A buffer for the hangover / January brings, when we huddle & low, hay damp / in our shuttered mangers, pockets emptied / of savings & saviors

Heavenly Bodies

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

As the new millennium drew near, Erin’s family began preparing for the apocalypse. Jesus was going to return at the stroke of midnight, appearing in the New York City skyline as the ball dropped on TV and the moon turned to blood.

Losing Our Religion

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:00:00 -0400

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.

How To Be A Woman

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:00:00 -0400

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.

Sins Of The Mother

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 05:05:00 -0500

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.

Siri Tells A Joke

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 04:10:00 -0400

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.

Saved

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 04:00:00 -0400

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.

Reading From The Desert Fathers At The Laundromat

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500

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.

The Desert Within

leathtonino@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500

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.

Invitation

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:05:00 -0400

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.

Earth Perfected

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:05:00 -0400

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.

My Brother’s Dinner With The President Of Sears

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0400

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.

At The Arraignment

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 05:00:00 -0500

Which of us has never broken a law? / I died for you — a desperate extravagance, even for me. / If you can’t be merciful, at least be bold.

Maryam And Yeshua

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Maryam: And then the soldiers — oh, the soldiers. I’d take my time with them. I’d do to them everything they did to you. Maybe I’d leave one or two alive so they could learn how life can be a long nightmare.

Yeshua: I tried to make people see that all we have to do is turn around, leave that whining precious self behind, let it go and see the wholeness of God’s Name, but people want magic and miracles and kings—

Monotheism At Thirty Thousand Feet

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Below me the world turned slowly through the night, unaware of the multilayered geopolitics my coffee-jangled brain was imposing upon it. I could find reasons to forgive Judaism and Islam their present-day sins. Christianity was another matter.

Worship

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

A miraculous experience, a mixed-faith couple, a big fat question mark

Geronimo’s Cadillac

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I suggest that a powerful antidote to the manufactured past now being created for us is the secret history of Indians in the twentieth century. Geronimo really did have a Cadillac and used to drive it to church, where he’d sign autographs.

The Explorer

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.

Sightings

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Shortly after her death, Mother Teresa appeared / in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee. / She looked serious, perturbed even, as though / this epiphany were an inconvenience.

Poverty And Precarity

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

We need always to be thinking and writing about poverty, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.