Back in September, I was thrilled to have a piece published in Ekstasis magazine. Ekstasis is a publication that’s doing some of the more interesting and excellent work that I’ve come across at the intersection of Christian faith and the arts. Most notably perhaps, they practice what they preach, and have created a beautiful space on their website and social media platforms to host serious conversations about pursuing art as a Christian creator. I can’t recommend them highly enough, and so I was honored when they decided to publish my work.

To summarize it, this piece is my attempt at describing the love I have for the written word, how that love has grown over the years, and how it has led me to the studies I’m working on right now. I’m discovering as I write more that narrative pieces are some of my favorite to work on, and this one was likely the one I’ve enjoyed crafting the most.

Here is an excerpt:

“To this project I turned with a passion, seeking out the sources of each text that I had stumbled upon, straining to hear the voices reverberating throughout their pages. I read Chesterton and he spoke of Dickens with a kind of awe; I read Dickens, and in his tales I saw the very same faces that pulled the trucks behind the shop for me to work on, the faces that had filled the warehouse I worked in years before. I discovered The Iliad’s influence on the Western canon, so I read of Hector and Achilles and the great quarrel of their people. I consumed Tolkien’s trilogy and was drawn into the ancient world he had wrought; soon I was exploring its annals further, reading of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion. I read in one book a passage taken from Tolstoy’s Confessions; I went to it and found the same spiritual and philosophical questions which had filled my own mind since youth, gathered into a single narrative and articulated with an unparalleled clarity and power; because of this I turned to Anna Karenina, read of jealousy and forgiveness and despair, of Levin’s struggles within himself and with the ultimate questions of existence.“

You can read the rest of it here.

I hope that you can find this piece valuable, and an encouragement in your own pursuit of knowledge and the beauty that it holds.