Letter from the Editor

In December, we wrote about Advent, about the time before Jesus arrived, about waiting and hoping for something to come. This issue is dedicated to the Arrival.

Now that Jesus has come, what does it mean for our world? How does that make us more human? How can we be more fully alive in the Anno Domini?

Poetry

We began with a poetry competition. Poetry gathers the flames of passion with the ice of loss to create words that flow like rivers of living water.

Poetry is all about image. It’s about using language to paint pictures, and so the winner of our first poetry competition was Garrett Flatt with his piece “The Cellist.” We loved the rhythm and the imagery. His line breaks buckled our breaths and his alliteration was pleasantly placed.

The second place winner was Hanna Velazquez with her poem “Cracks.” Her piece moves the reader through the winding cracks of our relationships, where the narrator struggles to define hers with her subject.

Art

Our artist showcase this issue is a painter named K Pastore. She is a story teller more than anything: “I try to present, to depict the people and the experiences that ask to be materialized.” The cover image of this issue is her piece The Priest.

Podcast

The latest podcast is about one of the most complicated and misunderstood aspects of Christianity: the Trinity. Of course, it’s misunderstood for good reason: it is somewhere beyond rationale. As Drew says, “Our problem is that we’re trying to use things in creation to describe the creator.”

Words

In 2005, one of Fathom’s favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, gave a speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College. He began with a story.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happened to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

“Seeing Water” is an article devoted to seeing what’s nearly impossible to even notice: the mundane all around us. A university lecturer takes us through one of his student’s questions and a milieu of cultural cues to find out what’s going on just beneath the surface.

Lots of reviews came through after this Advent season as we dive deeper into that water. We had reviews on the movies Arrival and La La Land, and the book The Broken Way by Ann Voskamp.

We also feature pieces on artificial intelligence, helping the poor, protesting, unveiling thin places, and a litany of things Fathom editors discovered across the internet.

And, finally, we love to discover death in new ways. We love reading and writing as much as we can about it, as horrific as that devil is. Reading the words that have just passed through death give us a new sense of life—a new hope and a new passion to be fully alive. One writer shows us how to greet the Specter, granting us permission to approach the moment when we finally arrive.