The roaring outside my window is loud as a freight train, but it’s a train that keeps on going, hour after hour, never making its departure. The sound of it sometimes wakes me in the night. It’s not a train, really. It’s the drill from the fracking site down the road, where my dad used…
I’ve been thinking about misogyny and the church even more than usual. A week ago, an ICE agent shot and murdered a woman named Renee Good, without reason or provocation. Days later, men who identify as Christian continue to defend the murderer, mock the victim, make jokes about her death, and say that she was…
I sometimes joke that I want to start a cooking blog where, instead of telling the same formulaic stories about “my grandmother used to make this cake,” or “my family discovered this stew on vacation,” I situate my recipes in dramatic fantasies and thrillers. Who wouldn’t want to try the cake I made for my…
Near the house where I lived as a child, there was a massive oak we called the Firefly Tree. It stood solitary in the middle of a tobacco field, and every summer attracted apocalyptic numbers of fireflies. Even from a distance, the whole tree glowed and pulsed like a disco party. Decades later, and hundreds…
I spent my early childhood in the rural South. The bulk of my social interactions were with our artists’ community of hippie Christian homeschoolers, but the folks who had been there for generations were friendly and pleasant, too. We knew the names of the shop owners in the poky little village near us. We even…
“They who fight with monsters should be careful lest they become a monster. Gaze too long into the abyss, and the abyss will also gaze into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil We all know the quotation. Like many of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, it has taken on a life of its own, and people…
My region is experiencing severe drought. The grass is pale and crispy, streams are low, the corn looks stunted. Farmers still haven’t gotten their second cutting of hay in, and I worry about what the future holds. This is part of a broader pattern of weather fluctuation that matches the climate assessment for my state….
With my knife I slash open the plastic bag, and the smell of the mulch hits me: damp cedar, fungal spores, moss, creosote. Something flashes, and for a moment I’m not planting boxwood with my family. I’m in Michigan, working as a landscaper. It’s never quite warm enough. I smell the green exhalations of reedy…
Most of us are familiar with the story of Jonah and the whale. God tells Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh to repent, but the prophet, instead, runs away, taking passage on a ship. So God sends a storm after him, and Jonah implores the sailors to save themselves by throwing him overboard. A…
I have a love-hate relationship with the book of Job. I hate that God lets the devil test Job. I hate that not only Job’s animals but also his children are horribly killed, and it’s somehow okay because God gives him new ones. (If you haven’t had a chance to watch Season 2 of Good…
For decades, there was a stigma around women eating out alone. In 1964 the New York Times published a piece about how single women were not always well received at restaurants and how other women were too self-conscious even to try it. Now many women are discovering that eating out alone isn’t shameful. It can…
The summer I was 19, I dropped out of college and moved to an organic wheat farm in Kansas to help start a radical conservative religious community. My motivations for doing this had more to do with restlessness and romanticism than with deep spiritual yearning, but even if I had been deeply committed I probably…
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