To Seek Healing The woman lay unresponsive in the hospital bed. Tubes and wires connected her to machines that kept her alive. Standing at her side, her husband stroked her hand. She didn’t flinch, stir, blink. No movement at all. The man asked me to pray that his wife be healed. After all, Jesus raised up Lazarus after he had been dead four days. Surely he could cure this woman who was so beloved. So I prayed for healing, believing as I do that healing means many things. Our hearts need restoration; our spirits get wounded and need to be soothed. These are worth praying for. Rarely, though, have I…
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Privilege and Entitlement in Kat Howard’s “Unseen World”
The Privilege of Magic Only some people can perform magic. Like any privilege to which we are born, whether it be masculinity, whiteness, wealth, heterosexuality, or attractiveness, the ability to weave a spell and make it stick is not good or bad in and of itself, except that society does make it so. Therefore, most of us end up confusing an accident of birth with entitlement. Kat Howard explores this tension between privilege and entitlement in her novel, An Unkindness of Magicians. The magic community, called the Unseen World, is divided into houses. Every twenty years or so the houses hold the Turning to determine which of them will rule…