Brett Foster

In “William Banks’s Wager,” Brett Foster reconstructs a letter from William Banks, a British clerk who venerated the famous Mount Grace Priory, in which Banks beseeches the monks’ prayers and confesses, with slight pleasure, a certain theft.

In a weary admonition, the narrator of “Luke 13:30: Tired Application” instructs us to be watchful at the end of days, to look with grim hope at the “One coming who’s casting out devils, making the blind see.”