Letter from the Editor

Living in the world means sharing in its joys and its sorrows. Our second issue is dedicated to being a human on this strange planet—suffering through an election season or finding what is truly successful.

However, sometimes the world isn’t all that bad. We can find joy in speaking well, recovering our imaginations, and discovering the subtle power of typography.

The article on typography is the first installment of a column I’ll be writing each issue about language called To Who It May Concern. Language is something we cherish here at Fathom. It’s what makes us human. No other species has so sophisticated a system as we, and no other creature is grasping for a way to talk about God.

In the introduction to Rowan Williams’s book The Edge of Words, he writes about speaking in this way, saying, “The recognition that we may be telling the truth about our world through unusual habits of speech—metaphors, gestures, fictions, silences—is a recognition of the diversity of ways in which information comes to us and is absorbed and embodied afresh.”

We hope with Fathom that our language is absorbed and embodied afresh with every issue, and To Who It May Concern is just one way we’re dedicating a space to talk about our words.

Our short story for “In the World” is written by Jed Ostoich, a freelance screenwriter and memoirist based in Dallas, Texas. The story “Honeysuckle Rail” chews on the deep and different commitments growing between a father and a son, between what we want and what is.

The podcast this issue is on the word #blessed and what we mean by it. Who’s blessing who, exactly? And what are the limits of that word in our everyday language? How was it used in the Bible? What do we do with it now? Drew Fitzgerald does as fine a job as ever going into the original languages and the context of the Bible to unearth its myriad uses.

Our featured artist is Kelsey Gambill, an illustrator and painter based out of Atlanta, Georgia. Her work is sprinkled throughout this issue, and we’ll be hosting some of her prints in the shop, which you can purchase abundantly in due time.

We hope this issue and every issue of Fathom is a time to stop and reflect on the world around us, both its joys and its sorrows, recovering our imaginations, thinking through our words, and diving back in.

Thanks for reading.