Essay

I.  The mountains were parched, their summer thirst unquenched by shallow stores of snowpack. The reservoirs were dangerously low. Each day, the sky (and my nose) filled with smoke that blew in from California forest fires, stubbornly coated the bowl of Utah Valley, and obscured the mountains behind my house. I griped on the way […]

My sacred space is everywhere, though for only a brief moment because with each step, each breath, I am in another space.

But this time it is different. As much as I love being in that place, and still hold it as holy, I know that it is not the place for me any longer.

The journey from knowing to believing is where the wilderness becomes holy and beautiful.

This impromptu dumpster Sunday School had become a holy space, a place of acceptance, learning, love, and light — the very epitome of what I had expressed hope for in my testimony.

In the sacred space between life and death, where the heavenly visions of the waking and sleeping unite, the early morning sun is insufficient to light my way.

We must go home; but we do not want to. Our dirty hands are clean. Our vulgar hearts are pure. We believe we are home already.

What does it take to make a place holy? As a scholar of European religious history and architecture, I have stood in many kinds of places that people of various faiths have designated as sacred and wondered exactly what it is that makes them different.

The first time I met Stephanie, I was exercising. I was dripping sweat, my face flushed and red, when I heard a knock at...

Puppies are agents of chaos, in a Manhattan apartment especially so.