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March 2018

March 26, 2018

Black Mirror and My Superego Nightmare

I watched Black Mirror’s “Crocodile” episode feeling as if writer/creator Charlie Brooker had gotten into...

February 2018

February 14, 2018

Suffering and Ash Wednesday

Suffering is the most dissociative word in the Christian lexicon. Raised Catholic, I was taught...

December 2017

December 28, 2017

The Jealous Prayer

In the first days of my MFA program, one of the mentors—a fiction writer I...

December 25, 2017

The Christmas I Sat Next to a Sex Offender

Last year my husband and I celebrated our first Christmas with our infant daughter. She...

October 2017

October 10, 2017

Famous Last Words

Towards the end of his life, Winston Churchill famously quipped: “I am ready to meet...

May 2017

May 12, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Rain”

The emotional landscape of motherhood can often be hard to describe and is underrepresented in...

January 2017

January 27, 2017

Poetry Friday: “Gravity and Grace”

There was a time, early in my process of conversion to Christianity, when I took...

July 2016

July 13, 2016

The Cult of Emotion

As a newish, struggling Christian recovering from two years in a fundamentalist youth group, I...

July 01, 2016

Poetry Friday: “For Whom the Resurrection Is the Full Moon Rising” by Mark Wagenaar

This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to...

June 2016

June 24, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Daybreak, Winter” by Betsy Sholl

I have a complicated relationship with the sun, having grown up in southern California and...

March 2016

March 18, 2016

Dancing on the Way to Prison

By John Bryant I’m standing in a circle with thirty singing and swaying old men...

January 2016

January 29, 2016

The Confessions of X: An Interview with Suzanne M. Wolfe, Part 2

By Gregory Wolfe and Suzanne M. Wolfe Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here. GW: One of...

October 2015

October 14, 2015

Driving the Dark Roads

The other day I got an email from a high-school boyfriend, which drove me headlong...

May 2015

May 08, 2015

Sugar, Sugar, Part 2: May 8, 2015

Continued from yesterday. When the editors of Good Letters first asked if they could rerun...

April 2015

April 29, 2015

Sexist Assumptions and the Difficult, Dirty Work of Grace

My husband was deep into a bathroom remodeling project when he asked me to stop...

March 2015

March 16, 2015

Grace and the Incomplete Flush

Almost two years ago my husband and I bought a condo in a cool old...

December 2014

December 15, 2014

Crime and Grace Collide in Denis Johnson’s Novels

On the back cover of Denis Johnson’s new novel The Laughing Monsters is a rather...

April 2014

April 09, 2014

The Prodigal Bears His Scars

My last communion was during a brief suspension of my former church’s policy of forbidding...

October 2013

October 22, 2013

Only God is an Atheist, Part 1

When she was twenty-one years old, far from home and as yet uncelebrated, Flannery O’Connor...

February 2013

February 13, 2013

What are You Doing for Lent?

“So what are you doing for Lent this year, Bill?” This was my annual question...