Guest post by Michael Leary After someone commits suicide you begin to filter through everything you know about them in the hope of gleaning all that remains good and beautiful and true. At first, this proves difficult: there isn’t much left but murk and silt. But you find yourself returning again and again, panning in the stream of memories because flecks of gold begin to appear and the mere weight of them feels so precious. I became familiar with this... Read more
This morning, as I tried to awaken from a fitful night’s sleep, I turned to “Darkness Falls on Gaza,” an opinion piece by Mohammed Omer in the New York Times. The piece begins, “Ramadan, when night descends, is usually a joyous time. Friends and family gather to break their fast at the iftar meal. Not this year.” “Nights are the worst. That is when the bombing escalates. Nowhere is safe. Not a mosque. Not a church. Not a school, or... Read more
For my junior high school Home Economics teacher, Mrs. Lesca Black, who taught me how to press every seam once you’d sewed it, and for Dr. Sandra DeJong, who said she thought I might be a feminist, after all. It all began, I suppose, with the hardbound set of Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks my mother ordered by subscription, lined up on a kitchen shelf between utilitarian metal bookends. There was one hardbound volume for each European region, and... Read more
Yesterday I wrote about the film Noah and the believing soul’s ambivalence to God. Today I want to quickly note that in his book God, Guilt and Death, Merold Westphal describes how there is actually ambivalence to God on the part of the unbelieving soul as well. “I don’t believe,” the unbeliever says with real reason—she doesn’t see enough evidence to believe, or the problem of evil and the unearned suffering of children make an all-good and all-powerful god, to... Read more
As it has become too expensive for our family of five to go to the theater together often, we usually wait to see movies until they reach the dollar theater here in town. This means that we usually do not see a movie until the flurry of reviews has passed. Not many people were still writing about Darren Aronofsky’s Noah when we saw it a couple of weeks ago. I come late to the conversation, but I still want to... Read more
Whenever you detect the mysterious smell of lavender in a house, it means a friendly spirit is passing through one of the nearby rooms. The fragrance has to come out of nowhere, I’m told, and it has to be strong. Otherwise, your mind is just playing tricks on you. And if you see pennies lying around on tables and windowsills, that means the spirits have “been visiting” while you were out. Again, nothing to be alarmed over; just some of... Read more
I didn’t spend enough time with Oscar this summer. For forty years I’ve believed time will never run out. Visiting California, I took my annual walk through my childhood backyard of bougainvillea, crepe myrtle, and fruit. I picked some strawberries, paid homage to my name scratched in a concrete border in 1980, then wandered to the side yard to find Oscar. I sat in the gravel as he gummed a piece of lettuce hanging in seaweedy strips. He’s always been... Read more
I write this on a Sunday, when people who spent the week shouting at busloads of refugee children sit in their churches, praising Jesus for his great mercies. The irony runs deeper: Those children gather because of a drug war we wage on their soil, which is supported by some of the same evangelicals loudly declaring we have no room for them. An estimated 60,000 Central American children will cross our southern border by the end of this year. There... Read more
Circumcise therefore the thickness about your hearts. —Deuteronomy 10:16 Her dying and death circumcised my heart. For weeks, I knew only this: she’s on a lot of pain medication; she’s hallucinating; she’s in the hospital; she’s home; she has a staph infection; she’s in the ICU; she’s doing better; she’s in rehab; she’s in the hospital; she’s coming home. How did I know the little I knew? Mother. She conveyed what they, my brother and sister-in-law, wanted others to... Read more
To celebrate Image’s twenty-fifth anniversary we are posting a series of essays by people who have encountered our programs over the years. Guest post by Paige Eve Chant I am not the kind of Christian my parents wanted me to be. Case in point: I rarely call myself a Christian in public. These days it seems more of a political statement than I’d like it to be—and often not one I’d care to make. I just don’t want the ordeal. Any... Read more
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