At the Intersection of Faith, Certainty, and Pain
I did not understand how this faith community could have such unshaken “certainty” about the world. Especially a certainty that does not make sense to me. I felt curious about it.
Essays
Visiting the Farm of the Rainmaker on a Hot Day
I had come to understand St. Louis through its divisions, through the Delmar Divide and the strange geography of abundance and deprivation that I had stumbled into on that bus ride years earlier. But food made the division feel different.
The Restorative Noise of Doing It Yourself at The Sinkhole
Located on Broadway in St. Louis’s historic Carondelet neighborhood, the venue has become something of a billowing steam vent in the city’s punk, hardcore, and metal scenes. A bastion to the do-it-yourself ethos long embraced by the subcultures of underground music, The Sinkhole boasts a single room, one bar, and a ceiling as low as its overhead.
The Democracy of Trauma, the Parliament of Pain
Trauma culture might be the last prank of late-stage capitalism. We have branded our own pain.
Roald Dahl, Hidden Auteur for ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” is by turns charming, troubling, funny, dark, romantic, nonsensical, and weird. More than many other movies, it continues to inspire questions about its layers of inventiveness, even though its premise—that specific inputs cannot explain magical output—is in the news every morning now.
A Spiritual Palimpsest’s Stacked Stories
What I had known was that I was living next to a church for the past five years of my life. What I had not known was that, for all these years, I was in the midst of a “Spiritual Urgent Care Center,” the appellative Reverend Fannie S. Johnson opts for to remind her congregation of the purpose of their gathering at Bracy every Sunday.
Untitled Pictures in an Exhibition
The untitled photograph is not merely a breach between memory and hope, but rather an invitation to inhabit that breach from a distance.
Journey to the Crossroads of America and the Hope of Obama Land
Can this controversial, privately funded $850 million center—dismissed by many as a vanity project, architectural folly, and dangerous precedent—really shore up democracy?
Remembering Richard Wright, Outsider
Richard Wright has in common with Thomas Hardy that the plots in his fiction are sometimes intricate to the point of distraction, and the events he depicts are often sensational, sometimes to a fault. His novels published after “Native Son” have much to recommend them. Still, “Native Son” and “Black Boy” stand as his most enduring achievements. They capture the isolation from mainstream society that is the reality of many young Black people, in the time of Wright’s youth and in our time.
A Star Friendship, a Story of the Depth Divers Dive
My mother would have said, “He’s a mess,” but Leon had a punk attitude, loved performative wildness, and was hugely capable. Is it a surprise what came next?