Ritual & Word Play

Steven Faulkner on Ancient & Modern Witnesses to a Fruitful Endowment

I found myself walking along a camel track with three old men on their way to a shrine on the ancient island of Crete. I was listening, because I have little to say at times like this, only questions. It was a hot day in June, sultry, with a warm wind off the sea, our sandals kicking the dust, stepping over donkey dung, and avoiding the roadside thistles. Sometimes we caught a glimpse of the ocean.

The Athenian Philosopher

The shrine was a long way off through broken country, so there was time to talk and time for me to listen. Klinias, something of an older statesman or politician . . .

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Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).

more on philosophy from the online archives

32.5—September/October 2019

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32.6—November/December 2019

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29.5—Sept/Oct 2016

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