Anna Swartwood House: The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European
The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny during this period of introspection over the legacy of racism in society.
Jena Schwartz: Day 209
God pulls into a run-down motel and pays in cash. God wears a mask and walks slowly down the hallway and the one light bulb is flickering as he turns the key in the door.
Christine Fair: The Revenge of Farkhunda
The mullah falsely accused Farkhunda of burning a Quran. Those who overheard the allegation immediately decided that she must be killed. She was beaten with bats, stomped upon, and driven over by a car after which her body was dragged by a car and then immolated. Her real crime? She had the temerity as a woman to challenge superstitious practices propounded by ignorant male clerics.
Robert Gibb: Angels in Homestead
Pale, sentinel, their stone wings
Open behind them, they stood about
As though the afterlife meant
To impress itself upon us
Stephen Muecke: What Aboriginal people know about the pathways of knowledge
What can living in one place for 60,000 years teach a people?
John Samuel Tieman: Lauds
the Templar strolled the cloister
after the dawn office
the sky was a sort of orange
like he had seen in the East
BJ Ward: First Thanksgiving
A chair was never emptier
than on the first Thanksgiving
after my father died.
Sydney Lea: Hole
He says even in the joint they didn’t have no trouble
gettin product
and once when they couldn’t, why, a bunch of them
shot up whatever, fools
that they all was
Jeffrey Harrison: The Light in the Marsh Grass
we gave up trying to explain it, gave ourselves
to it—as if we had ingested some hallucinogen
that opened our eyes to what was there all along
Stephen Dobyns: Leaf Blowers
That autumn morning he awoke to the crying
of lost souls that quickly changed to the roar
of leaf blowers up and down the street
David D. Daniels III: Black Church has been getting ‘souls to the polls’ for more than 60 years
To King and other civil rights leaders, the Black Church was a key institution within the pro-democracy movement.
W.S. Merwin: Another River
he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light
