Tag: death
Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison...
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.
Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies
Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.
We are Bound by Suffering and Love
Many religions understand suffering to be laden with the potential for spiritual awakening through a reduction of worldly attachments. But Christianity has a unique understanding of suffering that offers a particular kind of solace.
Heighten the Mystery
With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?
Pancakes with My Father
My father cried the day his stroke began, as he lay in the emergency ward, watching himself lose his speech and his strength. He cried the day after the stroke receded when my mother and I came to see him, as he looked at us looking at the wreckage.
Dying Properly—like a Dumb Ass (A Dispatch)
Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.
Walking in a Dead Man’s Shoes
A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”
Dirt Thick with Known Dead
While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about...
Love in the Place of Almost Death
At the height of the political tension in King Lear, the corrupt usurpers of Lear’s throne are at the helm of Britain’s defense against...