Natural Ends

Orion Magazine 

Religious language has a way of creeping into conversations about climate change and environmentalism. There are discussions of “belief” and “doubt;” environmental advocates agonize over how to “convert” people who are skeptical of climate change—especially white evangelical Christians—to ‘believers’ who will put their faith and collective influence into action to curb the worst effects of a warming climate. As I left Ramsey Creek and drove an hour east to Grace Church’s new cemetery, I wondered if burial—a rite of passage in which the material, physical world and any spiritual sense of a life beyond it are always inherently entwined—could offer an entry point for conservative Christians who might otherwise feel uneasy with climate change activism or environmentalism. 

The Life Everlasting

Sojourners

This is the logic of resurrection that I can’t quite shake, the internal, embodied rhythms of the earth’s predictable cycles lulling me into believing there will always be more: That what we lose will come back to us, in whatever new forms.

For the Living of These Days

The Bitter Southerner 

By being linked so irrevocably to the creation story found in Genesis, evolution now seems imbued with its own “scriptural underpinnings” and theological implications. As a new story — even as an alternate origin story — evolution suggests to me that people are not a finished product. Instead, we are the promise of ongoing change that will extend far beyond any of our individual lives. We have been otherwise before, and if we continue on this earth long enough, we will be otherwise again. Thanks be to God.

‘With This Inheritance, I Was Getting Too Much’

Sojourners

The promised land story reminds us that “land promise and land violence,” as Brueggemann wrote, are “twin claims that … cannot be separated out.” Is there anything in the story of the promised land that can be redeemed? Is there anything in this inheritance that can be made, somehow, instructive? In his writing reexamining the promised land, Brueggemann used a phrase — “epistemological repentance” — that I wrote repeatedly in my notebook, as a kind of incantation.

World Without End

Guernica 

It seemed there was no real end of the world to be found here—only massive and continual change, not so unlike the world we live in now. I wonder if change might be harder to imagine—maybe even harder to bear—than a definitive end.

This is Paradise

The Bitter Southerner

In the long list of plants and animals facing similar challenges and dwindling numbers, it might seem hard to justify the amount of attention and resources that the Florida torreyas command. Focusing on one ailing species often feels like a choice to ignore another. Compared with the Florida yew, with its cancer-fighting potential, or the gopher tortoise, whose deep, winding tunnels protect other species fleeing fires, it’s hard to know what the Florida torreya offers — what it means — other than its role in a story projected onto it.

The Charged World 

Image Journal  

My father didn’t baptize me. Two of his old seminary buddies did it. But when I was a child he washed my hair every night. Kneeling on the cold tile, he would pour water over my head with a plastic lemonade pitcher. He would wring my hair dry, wrap me in warm towels, and put me to bed. Now, I think of that ritual as our own nightly baptism.

The Ark at the End of the World

The Bitter Southerner

In the faith tradition I grew up in, science and religion were compatible — not competing — sources of truth. This made any tensions I felt between the world and the church negotiable, a question of my ability to hold multiple perspectives in tension, rather than choosing one over the other. But the certainty, the demands, of a more conservative theology might be a more effective tool for retention rates. The religion I was raised in never demanded that I choose it and forsake all else, so I never did.

Writing that Hurts

The Rumpus

These objects taught Doty how to love the world, and his descriptions demonstrate his argument: that the language of ideas is “a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time”; that memory does what art does, “which is to take the world within us and somehow make it ours”; that description, borne of outward attention to the world, ultimately gives us back ourselves.

Crying in Church

 Image Journal  

It should not surprise me, now, that my father seems so inseparable from the ritual of worship itself. But in the last year I’ve spent going to church, I’ve felt the rhythm of ritual becoming more persistent, insistent somehow, in my body, in my own burgeoning understanding of what faith might look like without my dad standing at the threshold and welcoming me inside.

The Last Time 

 Terrain.org

Each week, my father wrote his sermons at the dining room table with a worn Bible spread open before him, filling hundreds of notebooks with his tight, tiny script. Whenever I caught a glimpse of him hunched over his notebook, his work seemed as rare as dowsing, as specialized as horology, utterly mysterious to me.

When a Green Book Site Goes Up For Sale 

The Atlantic's CityLab 

Despite new landscaping and sidewalks, Henry Street appears bombed out—deliberately attacked. Some Gainsboro residents think that is, in fact, the case—that the urban renewal projects which decimated the neighborhood were targeting Henry Street and the revenue of its black businesses. “This was war,” a community leader recently told me, “plain and simple.”

Memphis Burning 

Memphis Flyer 

The lynching of Ell Persons is a story no one told me about my home. I never heard Persons’ name in a history class or read about the lynching in a textbook. I first encountered Persons’ story in my own reading, years after I finished high school in Memphis and moved away for college. When I went looking for the site where Persons was lynched, there was nothing to suggest whether I was in the right place.

When Memphis Fell for a Pyramid Scheme

The Atlantic's CityLab 

Articles spanning the last 50 years of Pinch history often described it as on the cusp of something: The neighborhood was “making a modest comeback,” “slowly coming back to life,” “poised for a Renaissance,” “nearly dormant,” “once-thriving,” “coming back,” and “not dead yet.” But wherever the Pinch was headed, it never seemed to arrive.