O for a Thousand Tongues to Mutter
For a fallen soldier Today, two gray ministers meet a body, go before it, sing or say some pale business about our utterly solitary passage in and out of life, during which we may resolutely bless the Lord and, after a while, simply resurrect. Today, well-meaning ministers speak some truth to a hollow congregation sick of death. In a plain chapel with no more kneeling room, the... Read More
Hate Invasion
Like swoops of dark birds settling, anxieties and doubts weigh the branches, folding huge wings as they land. Heavy, broody, and fidgeting, they’ve moved in, building their awkward nests like clots in the trees, black twigs jutting. Clouds will pass, but the mass of sooty bodies walls off the sky, the stars, any heavenly light. A clatter rises, intensifies, dense as rifle fire... Read More
Sequence
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. By craft I led the black otter onto land, then calmed it with a drug and other sorcery. Another raised the knife and dressed the flesh. Roasted, it was bitter like a stone or a scroll, and it could not... Read More
Tillers of the Ground
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain . . . and his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. —Genesis 4:1–2 The dirt under her nails, in her finger creases, smells like iron, tastes like salt. Eve smooths the barren soil like a restless baby’s back, tracing circles of Hush-a-bye, be still to earth’s... Read More
We The Village
In the days when our courthouse was being built, a mason—we don’t know who—came to our village in the night and inscribed a simple phrase on the building’s cornerstone: God’s will be done. We were, at first, outraged that someone had dared to soil our builder’s work, but over the course of generations, the mason’s phrase became our prayer, our devotion. Even now we... Read More
Evil Is What Humans Do: An Interview with Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman is one of America’s most important poets. He is the editor of Poetry magazine, the author of several poetry and essay collections, and a revered contributor to such prestigious publications as the Harvard Divinity Bulletin and the New Yorker. His forthcoming book, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, explores the central themes of his work, including... Read More
Things that Fall and Things that Stand
Editor’s Note: In 2010, The Other Journal published The Spirit of Food: Thirty-Four Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God, a collection of essays and recipes that colorfully depict how our acts of eating echo the community of the church and the sacrament of Communion. Now, as a companion to Gregory A. Boyd’s recent essay on the randomness of evil, we publish an essay from... Read More
Sexuality and the American Man: A Review of Robert Clark’s Heaven
Tales of homosexual love are becoming common, and with them, explorations of what being gay was like when it was considered both a mental illness and a crime. The character Sal on AMC’s Mad Men promised to look into this, but apparently the writers tired of him after a couple seasons. The recent romantic dramedy Beginners is based on the true story of the writer’s father, who... Read More
Advent and Teddy
After dinner I get a call from one of the homies: towering and tattooed Teddy. While working as a jail chaplain with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley, I found myself being adopted as the pastor of a network of Chicano gang members. The first two times I met Teddy at these midnight gang meetings, he nearly assaulted me. He was drunk at the time, but that same boldness... Read More
Tasting the Animal Kingdom
Editor’s Note: In 2010, The Other Journal published The Spirit of Food: Thirty-Four Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God, a collection of essays and recipes that colorfully depict how our acts of eating echo the community of the church and the sacrament of communion. One of these essays, “Tasting the Animal Kingdom,” which we have chosen to feature in our Food Issue,... Read More
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