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I approached the project’s new anthology with some skepticism. Its contents quickly dispelled my doubts.

The first crack that began the deconstruction of my faith came in the Old Testament class I took my freshman year of college. The professor was giving a lecture on Exodus (my favorite book) and the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea. “Oh, by the way,” he said in passing, “the Red Sea is probably better interpreted as ‘Sea of Reeds’ and wasn’t really a sea as we imagine it, simply a vast marsh that perhaps dried miraculously with a strong wind.”

On Christmas morning, he told us: he was considering suicide.

Prayers for Children and the apophatic tradition

It was on a Friday in spring 2021 that Letta Cartlidge decided she had seen enough.

In her backyard in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a stack of bangles on her arm and an oversized cardigan draped around her shoulders, Cartlidge explained to the Century how on April 15, 2021, James McDowell, a former principal at Hillcrest—a boarding school primarily for the children of missionaries in Jos, Nigeria—admitted in a private Facebook group for Hillcrest alumni that he had “molested” two students during his tenure.

My mother didn’t like the name Mary: too Catholic. And she didn’t much like my grandmother for whom I was named: too Baptist. But she did believe in giving her children proper names after their grandparents, so in the end, tradition won out. I was named Mary after my father’s Virginian mother but called Polly “for short,” even though it’s longer.

Every so often, I pull out my old prayer journals and look for patterns or trajectories. What have I prayed for consistently? What requests have I stopped making? How have I approached God differently over time?

Tiffany Brooks offers much more than just another exvangelical anger manual.

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “Field.”

“One day,” says Avivah Zornberg, “I had a flash of insight about Leviticus as a whole.”