Emily Votruba
Brooklyn Parks Monster Preview
By Emily VotrubaI don’t go to parks. I invoke an agreeable and right-headed remark by writer Joy Williams to explain myself, because Williams and I are in sync re: nature. When an interviewer suggested that, given that humans are a corrosive force in the natural world, the “moral alternative” is to live not in the wilds of Montana but in New York City, Williams agreed. "I don’t have to see a place," she said. To paraphrase: Just knowing the wilderness is pristinely out there is good enough, without one’s having to actually be in it.
The Brooklyn Tabernacle Moves On Up
By Emily VotrubaHe that gathereth in summer is a wise son, but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame. - Proverbs 10:5
Jihad In Brooklyn: Just What We Do Every Day
By Emily Votruba“‘Adib’ means analytical one, someone who can figure things out,” according to Adib Rashid, the imam of the Masjid Abdul Muhsi Khalifa in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Off The Shelves
By Michael Calderone, Eleanor J. Bader, Ellen Pearlman, Paul Grimstad, Emily Votruba, and Jana PrikrylPeter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet’s bible is not a monolithic mirror reflecting the state of religion in America post 9/11 but more like a disco ball:
Missionary Creeps
By Emily VotrubaNot every literary debut gets blurbed by the president of the United States, and not every Christian proselytizer gets out of darkest heath alive, saved by three Special Forces helicopters in the dead of night in time to have their hair done in Islamabad before a press conference in the morning. But this was the astonishing, if not miraculous, fate of Dayna Curry, 30, and Heather Mercer, then 24, when their three-month ordeal in Afghanistan came to a close on November 14, 2001.
