Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tenn.
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‘With This Inheritance, I Was Getting Too Much’
CALLIE WALKER GREW up in central Virginia, where her father farmed cattle on land he’d purchased in the 1960s. Walker, 56, with bright blue eyes and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, doesn’t know how much land her father originally owned. “It was certainly hundreds of acres,” she said, “and it may have been thousands.”
He spent 30 years paying it off, Walker told me, and succeeded, largely, by selling off a parcel of land here or there to pay the bills. When Walker’s father died in 2014, at 91, he left his three children portions of the remaining acreage; Walker’s inheritance — green, rolling farmland unfurling on either side of a small country road — totaled 134 acres.
Walker attended Princeton Theological Seminary and spent years living communally and working for racial justice. She had known since the 1990s that she wanted to use the property she would one day inherit for some kind of intentional community.
By January 2020, Walker’s intentions for the land clarified: She wanted to give it away.
I’m Just Not Ready to Give Up on Resurrection
What the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker teaches us about belief and unbelief.
Illustration by Chris Buzelli
The ivory-billed woodpecker has been called “Lord God Bird,” for its massive size; “Grail Bird,” for the fervor with which people seek it; and “Ghost Bird,” for the way it hovers on the murky edge between existence and extinction. But Cornell ornithologist Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird, calls it “Lazarus Bird,” after the story of Jesus resurrecting his friend Lazarus four days after he died.
Growing up in the church, I was never sure what to do with resurrection. My father’s faith didn’t emphasize the idea that Christ died for my salvation, or that Christ’s believers would be raised from the dead, but these beliefs were everywhere—in the hymns we sang in the various United Methodist churches where he served as pastor, in the creed we recited every Sunday: I believe in ... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
From my seat in the pews, the promise of everlasting life rang hollow. I did not expect decomposed bodies of believers would one day be reconstituted, nor did I see this as desirable for myself or the people I loved. But metaphorical interpretations of resurrection also fell short: A body raised symbolically from the dead is still very much dead. In graduate school, I read about Thomas Jefferson’s excision of miracles, including the resurrection, from his Bible with a sense of relief. The stories I couldn’t believe literally or understand figuratively, could be simply cut away. But as I’ve grown older, these stories resist neat excision. To dismiss resurrection entirely feels increasingly fraught: Why did faith matter if it did not transform real bodies, real lives, here on earth?