When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, ٢just naturally reverent,٣ a fact that didn't change when shemuch to her own confusionlost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: ٢You 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.٣ A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay ٢Thin Places٣ (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. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?
Jordan Kisner.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-254).
