All of the 13 essays somehow negotiate the relationship between inside and outside and the question whether these borders are permeable. that seem particularly foreign to us, especially when it comes to religious attitudes and mores like debutante balls. In her debut collection of essays, Jordan Kisner ponders identity and spirituality in modern-day America - reading this as a European, I can say that many of these texts capture those cultural aspects of the U.S. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith? Her celebrated essay 'Thin Places' ( Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: 'You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyonce.'Ī curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. She was, she writes, 'just naturally reverent,' a fact that didn't change when she-much to her own confusion-lost her faith as a teenager.

When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. In this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaning

Thin places jordan kisner