On Assignment, Virgil Rescues Dante from the Wilderness
A Divine Comedy reading group with two artist friends deepens the author’s understanding of Dante’s transcendent friendship with Virgil. By Diane Mehta
Category: Writers & Writing
Love and the Cosmos
Rumi perceived love as nature’s animating force. By Munjed M. Murad
On Waiting, Tending Life, and Comedy at God’s Scale
A conversation with Courtney Sender, MTS ’18, on her first novel, a braided story collection titled In Other Lifetimes: All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me. By Kevin Madigan
Paths of Coincidence in Thomas Hardy
The melodramatic aspects of Thomas Hardy’s novels lend themselves to an examination of the ordinary uncertainty of life—the landscape of Michael Jackson’s Coincidences: Synchronicity, Verisimilitude, and Storytelling. By Maria Cecilia Holt
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
The Climate of the Future
Imagining a path forward in a post-capitalist world. Terry Tempest Williams with Kim Stanley Robinson
‘Literature is Common Ground’: On Reading Virginia Woolf
A Q&A with Stephanie Paulsell on her latest book, Religion Around Virginia Woolf. By Sarah Fleming
Housekeeping’s Contemplative Approach to Longing
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping explores the human response to the transient. By C. E. Morgan
On Exile and Elsewhere
A lively conversation with author André Aciman on the self-help book he never wrote and why a sense of irony is a Jewish trait. Benjamin Balint and André Aciman
Eliminate the Muslim
The forces of paranoia, progress, and productivity drive the construction and surveillance of Muslim identity in narratives of postcolonial future-making. By Ahmed Ragab
What the Gospels Share with Fanfiction
The desire of the later Gospel writers to take up the pen parallels the contemporary phenomenon of fanfiction. By Jade Sylvan
Imagining Greene in Islamabad
Graham Green chronicled the thin line between virtue and vice. By Chris Herlinger
Crossing Rivers
As his understanding of religion changes, a writer finds a way to continue a lifelong spiritual journey with his grandfather. By Eric Gutierrez
Recalled to Life
Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel. By Davíd Carrasco
Reclaiming the Rainbow
Daria Donnelly took children’s literature very seriously, in her book reviews and in her passionate conversations with adults and young people alike. By Wendy McDowell
Are You There, God?
What does it mean both to a writer of children’s books, and to her readers, that she has consciously, deliberately chosen to live out her life as a person of faith? By Katherine Paterson
