We asked Monica West ’99 about Revival Season (Simon & Schuster), a coming-of-age story about the daughter of an evangelical preacher who each year takes his family on the road to heal souls and bodies.

On her not-straight-path to becoming a novelist

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

A few of our stories of realization came to us as spoken words, not as writing or images. We’re sharing them here as part of our podcast "The Devils' Share."

It’s been four years, but it feels like it all happened yesterday. The first week of July 2016 was tumultuous. The nation was rocked by two killings of Black men at the hands of law-enforcement officials. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling died in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after an altercation with police officers. Philando Castile was shot and killed the next day after alerting a police officer that he was legally carrying a gun.

AS A MAJOR in both computer science and visual arts, I had been eager to design a project that merged these two fields through the use of machine learning. I quickly gravitated toward doing a black-and-white relief print and then experimenting using other mediums in combination.

We asked Jason DeParle ’82, a New York Times reporter and author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, about what he learned about global migration from following a family for thirty years.

When I approached the Army ROTC offices in the basement of the West Duke Building in 2002, my sophomore year, I had one purpose in mind—finding a way to stay in college. 9-11 was a fresh memory, but the prospect of war seemed distant and unlikely. I wanted to secure my future, and a degree from Duke was a major part of my plan. I needed a scholarship, and the Army seemed like my best bet.

Nour has fair skin and gray-blue eyes, accentuated by her ocean-colored hijab and dress. She tells us how in love she is with her husband, how he waited three years until she was old enough to marry him. She speaks of her son as the only bright spot in her life here in Jordan, the only happy moment. She details the horrors of her father-in-law’s public murder in Syria and even shows us pictures of his flowery burial on her cell phone.

Ibrahim Saber carefully chooses a piece of wrinkled fruit from the paper plate being passed around the room. He hasn’t eaten all day, but he waits a few moments longer. Holding it between thumb and forefinger like a sticky jewel, he closes his eyes. Silently, he blesses the fruit in the name of Allah. Then he bites in, chewing slowly, breaking his fast with the sweet taste of a medjool date.

In Letter to a Man in the Fire, the late writer and longtime Duke professor Reynolds Price ’55 makes an eloquent case for the existence of a caring God. He pauses at one point in this extended essay, which draws on his own nearly fatal battle with cancer, to acknowledge that his sincere hope for an afterlife “would seem lunatic to many of my university and writing colleagues.”

Newly arrived at Duke from King’s College in London, Luke Bretherton brings a fresh perspective on how Christian churches and faith-based causes intermesh with American political life. In a recent Office Hours interview, Bretherton, an associate professor of theological ethics and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, describes four key “temptations” that pose problems for the church as it carries out its public ministry.