Desert Sayings
Poetry by Donovan Mcabee
Category: Autumn/Winter 2022
A Theological Reckoning with ‘Bad Trips’
Reducing transcendence to its therapeutic potential ignores volumes of wisdom from traditions that emphasize the dangers of nonordinary experience. By Rachael Petersen
The Greening of Psychedelics
The formation of Greenpeace and Earth First! in the 1970s was a reformation within the largest cadre of militant psychedelics, the Yippies!. By J. Christian Greer
A Year of Being With
Paintings, poetry, and reflections on entering a state of being “fully aware of the presence of another being and our shared environment” while making art. By Maisie Luo
Maisie Luo, Earth Seer
In November 2021, Maisie Luo took a ritualistic path through Harvard Yard with her painting of the North Atlantic right whale. By Terry Tempest Williams
What Can Ancient Spiritual Poetry Teach Us about Living?
A working definition of sacred poetry rises directly out of this poet’s experience as a child praying in Arabic: earnest, musical language meant to thin the partition between a person and a divine. By Kaveh Akbar
On Waiting and Wanting
Reading Simone Weil, Fanny Howe, and Mark Jordan helped demonstrate how we can be transformed through the process of waiting. By Nancy Yuen-Fang Chu
Cannon, Williams, and Womanist Survival
Womanism founders Katie Cannon and Delores Williams created groundbreaking work that has led to a wide range of scholarship focused on the thriving of Black women. By Gary Dorrien
Words in the Blood
In Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk, Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. exposes the toxic allure of blood imagery in Christian art, literature, and practices. By Mark D. Jordan
Mormonism, the ‘Most American’ Religious Other
Mormons continue to be depicted in popular culture as victims, criminals, or disaffected. By Jaxon Washburn
Prison Theology
Austin Reed’s antebellum memoir The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict subverts notions of incarceration as spiritually regenerative. By Klaus C. Yoder
Racial Liberalism and the Ethics of Law and Justice
A selected reading list from Terrence L. Johnson’s course “Racial Liberalism and the Ethics of Law and Justice.”
Building Trust through Truth-telling
A Q&A with Wendy Sanford and Mary Norman about These Walls between Us: A Memoir of Friendship across Race and Class. By Eva Seligman
Abolitionist Theology Can Help Us Reimagine Schooling
Schooling must be abolished so that education can begin, and abolitionist theology is a starting point. By Ashley Y. Lipscomb
How Do We Think and Act Anew?
This is the other main theme running through the issue: the need to “treat our materials seriously” and use our creative powers to imagine—indeed, to build—what is not yet, as Lipscomb puts it, “to create a world we have not seen.” By Wendy McDowell
