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Natalie Ramsland

Articles

Next Year in Bunnytown A couple years ago, I took my white family to see the Langston Hughes production Black Nativity in a small church in a historically Black neighborhood in Portland. The pews were packed, and the performance space overflowed into the audience. We were specifically invited to sing and stand and move as we felt led. When, in the telling of Jesus’ birth, the lovingly wrapped black plastic baby doll was carried down the aisle, my four- and six-year-old kids whispered to me in awe “Hey, we know that guy!”

Issue: On Vision (January 2021)

Before the Monsoon (review) In the author statement that concludes Eleanor Dart’s latest book of poems, Before the Monsoon, Dart writes, “I don’t want to leave my writing buried in filing cabinets when I depart this life. Hence, this book.” I imagine her poems being rescued from papery depths, freed from the ponderous weight of file folders and metal drawers. Perhaps these poems once lived among tax statements, instruction manuals, love letters, but in this volume, they live together without any trace of compression or randomness.

Issue: On Water (March 2019)

Preserving a Meaningful Life on Earth An interview with Carol Urner by Natalie Ramsland

Issue: On Weapons (January 2019)

Primitive Quakerism Revived (review) The path of spiritual growth has few shortcuts. In fact, the path is often uncertain, as if you were hiking at night on a narrow trail without a flashlight. Paul Buckley, in Primitive Quakerism Revived, challenges any timid pace we might take in our transformation – as individuals and as religious communities. He writes, “This book calls on Quakers today to . . . repossess the essential principles that energized and strengthened [seventeenth-century] Friends of Truth, to apply those principles to the various societies and cultures we live in around the world, and, once again, to be patterns and examples to our neighbors.”

Issue: On Bosses (July 2018)

Musical Ministry an interview with Anna Fritz by Natalie Ramsland

Issue: On Music (March 2018)

Library items