When it comes to sacred places, I feel considerable holy envy toward the Latter-day Saints. Their sacred sites stretch across the continent, from Vermont to California. Mormons can visit their founding prophet’s birthplace, the grove…
Instead of unremitting lucha libre, I desired détente between my sexuality and birth faith. A gap between graduation from law school and starting work opened a unique space for spiritual odyssey. I resumed attending church…
Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…
[…] passes for truth is entirely a fabrication, or lifted from somewhere else: that the deeper truths of human telling are fictions or plagiarisms or both. Even when Madden’s play strains credulity, playfully or confessionally […]
I struggle with beginnings. I always just want to get to it. However, allow me to take a bit of time to introduce myself before I tell the story of my experience with the collection…
[…] to revise the narrative, thanks to the work of Parry and others who have called out the human injustice and crime of massacre and genocide, but there are still claims that the violence turned […]
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…
[…] always like this? Did her family play a role in civic or economic matters? I saw no design in our wandering up and down the streets other than just getting to know the town, […]
[…] a shade of skin pigmentation. Criminals exist in every culture, in every race, in every shade of human. The world does not exist in categories of righteous races and wicked ones. And it came […]