Since I’m personally religious, it grieves me to admit religion is implicated in much of what’s wrong with society today: relentless attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people, public education, gun control, even democracy itself. I’m tempted to agree with those who regard religion as more problem than solution—especially here in Texas, where religion is so often linked with intolerance, racism, and hate.
A Fire to Light Our Tongues is a potent antidote to that temptation. Taking its title from contributor (and Texas Observer poetry editor) Naomi Shihab Nye, this anthology of poems, nonfiction pieces, and short fiction by nearly 60 Texas writers, set for publication July 7, displays an impressive diversity of spiritual perspectives. Edited by Baylor University lecturer Elizabeth J. Dell and her late Baylor colleague Donna Walker-Nixon, A Fire gives the lie to the common perception that religion in Texas is monolithically fundamentalist. It also demonstrates just how multifaceted faith can be, encompassing not just a set of beliefs, but also wonder, longing, doubt, and even despair.
As Joe O’Connell writes in the introduction, this collection is written both by and for “Texas believers/nonbelievers of many faiths.” For instance, Tarfia Faizullah uses the Quranic concept of kafir, unbeliever, as metaphor for her inability to accept her sister’s tragic death. Nan Cuba finds the sacred at a Mayan temple, while Norma Elia Cantú describes spiritual encounters with what she calls “the Divine Female Energy of the universe” at an Indigenous women’s retreat. Chaitali Sen tells the painful story of a university department chair who fights back against evangelical attacks on science. A coming-of-age story by Owen Egerton is set at a relentlessly evangelical summer camp; there, a teenager’s faith is challenged, perhaps broken, by his desire for a fellow camp counselor and the accidental death of another.
