Brontez Purnell is nothing if not prolific. The author of seven books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in ...

On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s account of his conversion to Catholicism in 1938 and his subsequent entry into a Trappist ...

Good intentions run amokGet Access to Print and Digital for $25.99 per year. Subscribe for Full Access ...

My wife, Heidi, and I put up a string of Christmas lights early in the pandemic. They were LEDs that slowly flashed different colors, hung along a copper wire that stretched above our windows. As 2020 ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

From “Romance Without Love, Love Without Romance,” which was published in the Spring 2021 issue of Liberties. I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once, we painted a giant fireplace onto ...

The Childhood of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 288 pages. $16. The Schooldays of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 272 pages. $16. The Death of Jesus ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 384 pages. $30. Are you sad? Unmoored? Confused? As a child were you deemed “sensitive,” as a young ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...