The Long Walk

  • The Dogs Who Keep Me

    Before I knew how to speak, I had a guardian. Sandy Her name was Sandy. She was a collie mix — gentle, watchful, steady — part of the family I was born into, and she was my guardian. Some of my earliest stories come from my mother, who used to watch me from the kitchen…

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  • More than the Last Rite

    What does a chaplain actually do? During college and for several years that followed, I was already known as an “adrenaline junkie” — someone who loved being an EMT, running hot in emergency vehicles, extricating people from wrecked cars, and going on search and rescue calls. There is a term that may more accurately describe…

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  • What Remains

    A Reflection on Yiyun Li and the Grief We Were Never Meant to Finish. Some books teach. Some books inspire. Some books comfort. Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow does none of those things — at least not in the ways I expected. I picked it up because she lost two sons, and I…

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  • Mo Bed

    Every morning at Taizé, the brothers offer communion. I was there on pilgrimage — a group of Arkansas pastors, all of us carrying years of ministry and, if we’re honest, years of accumulated certainty about how things are supposed to work. Taizé undid that quietly. The chanting. The long silences. The way a few thousand…

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