12 June 2008

“Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface.”

The June 9th and 16th issue of the New Yorker has a series of beautiful stories on the theme of Faith and Doubt, with a wonderfully diverse range of contributors. I like them all, but if I had to recommend just one, it would be Tobias Wolff's “Winter Light,” recounting the screening of a Bergman film in a church during his college years, and concluding with a few thoughts on faith and aesthetics. It's not too long, and definitely worth your time.

Also, Allegra Goodman's contribution, “Counting Pages,” gets the idea of growing up in a faith exactly right:

“And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me. Might that be the way belief works for some people? Not a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths. No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wasn't that a great edition of the New Yorker?

One of my favorite articles to date was two weeks prior to that on a soup kitchen in Chelsea.

Hope things are well, buddy.

Chris