The author is grateful to Jill Bialosky and the team at W. W. Norton for bringing three collections of essays, two collections of poetry, and a book of short fictions into being, and to Richard McDonough, agent extraordinaire, who found good digs for these projects. Robin Robertson, likewise, through his offices at Jonathan Cape in London, has been essential to these efforts. David Dobson at Westminster John Knox Press brought The Good Funeral, coauthored with Thomas G. Long, and, most recently, Whence & Whither into being. Gordon Lish published my first poems at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and commissioned my first essay for The Quarterly more than thirty years ago. For their scrutiny and attention to this work in words, the author is permanently grateful.
Thanks too to the editors of journals and periodicals, radio producers, academics, journalists, seminary presidents, and conference programmers for their interest in my reviews, commentaries, and opinions, where some of these essays first appeared, in broadcast or print or spoken word venues, in various incarnations of the texts found in this volume, among them:
The Candler School of Theology at Emory University
The Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Notre Dame University
The Wellcome Collection, London, UK
Commonweal magazine
The Journal for Preachers
BBC Radio 4 and Cast Iron Radio and Kate Bland
RTE Radio Ireland
NPR USA
PBS Frontline
Southword Journal (Munster Literary Center) Cork, Ireland
For many years my work has been enriched by friends and close readers, sons and daughter, colleagues and artists, the reverend clergy and family members, without whose ongoing conversations these essays would not have taken shape, among them Michael Heffernan, Keith Taylor, Richard Tillinghast, George Martin, Julie Young, Mary Tata, Colonel Dan Lynch, Patrick Lynch, Corrine D’Agostino, Emily Meier, Carolyn Belknap, Thomas Long, Doug McMunn, Eric Lorentzen and anonymous others—all fellow pilgrims in love’s bewilderments and life’s sustaining grace and mercies. No amount of thanks is sufficient to their generosities, nor catalog of gratitude complete without their names.