Charlie Riggs is a writer, historian, and tour guide living in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Cities are palimpsests, their contemporary surfaces concealing, though not entirely effacing, their more remote past.
Tillich suggested another word—and a curious one—to help interpret sin: estrangement.
The pandemic-era “doctrine of masks” contained no playfulness or irony.
We seem to be unable to do without our essences.