"The God Who Loves You" by Carl Dennis In Genesis 2, God creates Adam and then tells him he’s free to eat from any tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for when you eat from it you will surely die.” I can’t remember how many different … Continue reading Becoming Your Own God
Learning to Holiday
"The Cajun Night Before Christmas" by Trosclair If I do the math, I guess I've been celebrating Christmas now longer than I didn't, though I'm still not really comfortable with it. I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and didn't leave the church until I was 26 but those are the years when you learn how … Continue reading Learning to Holiday
Reclamation Part 2
This is the second installment about “Reclamation,” a response poem to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Part 1 is here. We moved around a lot when I was young—by the time I started second grade I’d been in four schools in two states—but when we got to Slidell, we stayed. We moved there in the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 2
Search for community, search for beauty
"Seraphim" by Patricia Spears Jones The last time I took a fiction workshop I wrote a not very fictional story about a person leaving the only church he’d ever known and trying to work through the loss that came with the decision. It wasn’t a good story, but also the audience (my classmates) mostly didn’t … Continue reading Search for community, search for beauty