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Featured Selections

From the Archives

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Archipelagoes

I am on a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with a full-grown ram between my legs — not the way I usually spend a summer Saturday. This began as a simple errand, to fetch a fleece for dyeing from John Finlay, a crofter and neighbor of my hosts.

By Rochelle Smith July 2009
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Talk

The sound of air expanding in my chest cavity and then being forced past the catgut of my vocal cords — that’s the sound my mother heard. It was a frightening, ugly sound, but the grief was pure and clean. Against the thickness of it, the viscosity, my mother would segue from soothing words into stories.

By Maureen Stanton May 2002
Fiction

B I R D

On a hot summer day when my brother was eight months old, my father carried him to the top step of the back porch, lifted him over his head, and tossed him into the weeds.

By K. A. Kern February 1996
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Why Religion Endures

On a spectrum of postures toward religious faith that runs from organized hostility to muffled contempt to resigned forbearance to never-crosses-my-mind indifference to against-my-better-judgment curiosity to serious interest to fellow-traveling to heartfelt engagement to missionary fervor, where do you place yourself, and how does that dispose you to others’ positions?

By Jack Miles March 2016
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

On Not Believing

If you look hard enough for a reason to support something you want to believe in, you’ll find it. We select a belief as we do a mate, seeking for that which best reflects ourselves and our needs. Both are fragile and tenuous affairs, but how much more fervently one will hold onto some beliefs, after many loves have come and gone.

By Sue Hartnett April 1974
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My First Night At The Initiation Camp

This year the millet fields had been generous and the harvest good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the house roofs, where it waited to be put into the granaries, was over. Now, in the fallow dry season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters — to initiation.

By Malidoma Patrice Somé August 1994
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Jets Cap

One day a woman on a subway platform called out to me, “Go, Jets!” while raising her fist. Puzzled, I looked behind me and saw no one. Then I remembered: I was wearing a Jets cap.

By Sparrow January 2017