Following Christ in the Machine Age: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
How do we stay human in a technocratic age? How do we live rooted lives —spiritually and otherwise — in an unsettled time? How do we make sense of life in the modern world? English writer Paul Kingsnorth has been...
The Austen Years: A Review in Six Movements
Rachel Cohen. The Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. 304 pp, $28. “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been...
Becoming a Perennial: A Conversation with Grace Olmstead
In Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind (March 2021) Grace tells the story of her hometown of Emmett, Idaho, where her great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived and farmed, and where her grandparents and parents still live. Through...
Farmers and Humanists in an Age of Crisis: Technology, Death, and Resurrection
As a teenager at my parents’ small-town church, I heard men in business suits express relief that they made it out of the farm where they grew up. “I got out,” they would say. The implication: I moved up. I...
Book Review: Easter Stories: Classic Tales for the Holy Season
The tales collected in Easter Stories: Classic Tales for the Holy Season don’t always mention Jesus, nor even the usual tropes like sunlight and springtime. But each reveal a particular melody of the Easter story. The lovingly crafted volume, edited...
The Factitude of Creeks
My daughter and I went on a hike today. I told her to put on her shoes, and she toddled over to her moccasins. I said we were going to the forest. She picked up her basket and carefully placed...
You, Too, Can Be a Badass, My Daughter: Enchantment and the Modern Fairy Tale
I read Neil Gaiman’s paean to badass womanhood, The Sleeper and the Spindle, days after I became a mother of a daughter. Gorgeously illustrated by Chris Riddell, the Snow White/Sleeping Beauty redux is told in Gaiman’s trademark weave: pellucid, dark,...