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Chloe Hollowell Hooks, "My Lover Thought He Resembled Plato (and He Did, if I Squinted)"

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Lisa Russ Spaar, Soul Cake

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I do often feel as if we (all of us, throughout all history and encompassing all religions) are sustaining a kind of empty fiction. Sometimes I feel this is the case simply because there is no God, and we are all self-deluded dupes. More often I feel it's because all of the ways we have learned to approach and define God are not simply inadequate but positively misguided. That we need to start over. But then sometimes I am shattered by the reality of God.

Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian

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Elisheva Fox, "psalm for time, all cinnamon and salt."

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Devon Walker-Figueroa, Lazarus Species

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Ross Gay, The Book of Delights / KC Flynn, "The Wounded Voice and the Crying Wound: Stanley Cavell, Trauma, and Theology" / Ursula K. Leguin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia / Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma

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Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value

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Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini

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McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

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James Baldwin, "The Artist's Struggle for Identity"

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Modern society makes a sharp division between freedom and obligation, as though the two were in conflict; this division is largely driven by market ideology which treats people as though they were atomized autonomous individuals who only contract themselves into relationship--a view of the world that is clearly mythical; all one has to do is look around at real human relationships to see that this view is not realistic. It is only through the anonymity of market relationships that we can ignore the fact that we rely on other people for almost everything in our life; and thus we can think of our freedom as separate from our obligations—as though our freedom did not depend on other people, and other people's freedom did not depend on us. In other words, the modern market society allows us to pretend that one man's freedom is not another man's obligation. An easy way to demonstrate this is to simply think of the food supply; how free could you be had it not been for the countless people, relationships, and institutions that are required for you to put food your table.

Roman A. Montero, All Things in Common: The Economic Practices of the Early Christians

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"In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others…. It is not a possession, a presence, an object,…but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means 'being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, Temptation: Two Biblical Studies

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Joerg Rieger, "Reconfiguring the Common Good and Religion in the Context of Capitalism", Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Politcal Theology, ed. Melanie Johnson DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, and Elias Ortega-Aponte

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John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event

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James Cone, God of the Oppressed

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Hilary Jerome Scarsella, "Trauma and Theology: Prospects and Limits in Light of the Cross", Trauma and Transendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory, ed. Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto

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Our birth inscribes us as beings-in-relation to others. But we do not always honor that birth or those relations. Historically we have tended to ignore that "debt toward that which gives and renews life," and approached others as mere objects to be appropriated for ourselves. Indeed, the immaterial separate God of many Christian theologies has helped conceal the infinite debt of our irreducibly material livelihood.

Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God

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Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology

Jean-Luc Nancy, "Rethinking Corpus", trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor

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China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto

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Li-Young Lee, "The Ark, the Tomb, the Altar, the Bridal Chamber"

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Line Holtegaard, "Shadow Hide III" / "Where the Moment Rests" / Shadow Hide I" / "Whispers of Light"

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Faith is a gift, not a capacity. Christians—especially Protestants—have too often made it seem the latter. Do you see what I mean here? Do you agree?

Interestingly, yesterday I was in Cambridge and had another cup of tea with Fanny Howe. She told me that she sometimes decides to be an atheist for a week. She does this because she admires atheism, the purity of it (obviously she's not talking about the insipid forms of "neo-atheism" that have been so conspicuous in American culture recently), and because it seems to her part of the experience of God. That's what Weil thought ("There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of God") and it's what I have been saying in a different way in some of these letters. But still, I found myself baffled. I could no more "decide" to not believe in God than I could decide to believe in him. Sometimes I find myself having fallen into atheism, though it is in no way purifying. It feels like failure, spiritual torpor, acedia. My point is that I don't feel in control of my belief in this way. I am in control of my attention, and that matters enormously, but whatever ignites attention into faith, whatever makes my seeing reciprocal, that is beyond me.

Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian

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Devon Walker-Figueroa, from "Crown Shyness", Lazarus Species

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John Philip Johnson, "Letter to Jane"

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Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian

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The truth is I believe in a God that died just as we die—alone, bereft, once and for all—and I believe in a God that broke free from that static tragedy and thereby transformed forever what we understand death to be and what we understand life to be. I believe we do in fact each create the God we serve, and I believe that underlying all of those creations is a singular being that is available and indivisible and constant for all of us. I believe that you and I have come to Christianity simply because it was the religion in which we were raised, and I believe that we are Christians because it is our fate. (How I love Paul Ricoeur's definition of faith: chance raised to the level of a destiny by virtue of a constant choice.) I believe there is no one truth, and yet we must wager everything on the one that claims us.

Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian

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Literary Matters

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Catherine Pierce