Sublime

turpitude.”

community formation

One other oddly big thing happened to Sam at the beginning of his junior year. Completely out of the blue, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University named Will Crouch* reached out and asked to meet with him. Sam never learned how the guy had found him—probably from the writing Sam had been doing on various utilitarian messa

hope, the belief that present circumstances can be overturned, that they need not—that they must not—have the final word.

These moments at the jail are sobering journeys into human hearts, through electric doors and the barriers produced by human pain. Jail is a place where a word can land you in isolation, where a sucker punch can be right around the corner, where grinding loneliness and only momentary flashes of hope exist, and where bitterness about life is worn li

Sisyphean task,”