Read any essay, story, or poem Terrain has ever produced, right here…
SPRING 2024
by Mitchell Schultz
In my (admittedly brief) life experience, the modern American layman holds a vague idea that Christianity and intellectualism are fundamentally incompatible ways of life. Most non-believers – and even some believers – point to the seeming dichotomy between the Judeo-Christian creation story and the scientifically reviewed and supported Theory of Evolution as a definitive sign that faith in a God and serious intellectual thought are incompatible.
by McKay Lawless
At the sight of dawn, darkness scatters and at the delicate touch of the sun’s beams, perched dew caves…
by Madelyn Hajovsky
It is only your fickle heart
learning some sense of permanence
as you pass from womb to womb,
making room for the eternal Present…
by Ava Malcolm
Most of us were raised on a steady diet of Percy Jackson, Magnus Chase, Marvel, and other modern myths. Although we may think of them as retellings of ancient narratives, no one would deny that they feel real, relatable, and immersive. They seem to reflect the stories of our own lives. Even though Bible stories aren’t wrapped up in the Rick Riordan packaging, Bible stories can also be viewed as pertaining to our own lives. We can take a similar approach in applying the principles found within them as we do to myths and demi-god stories.
by Josiah A. Jones
Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century philosopher and theologian, once wrote, “The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality” (“The Greatest Danger” 16-17). In 1854, he began writing one of his most prescient works: a scathing critique of the Danish church entitled The Attack Upon Christendom. He argued that despite Denmark’s status as an overwhelmingly Christian nation, the church had become an apathetic shadow of its true calling.
by Noah Thomason
The briny, brackish, tidal night retires…
by Hunter Rapp
Father Amos knew him well. He spoke to him on the long roads and quiet trails, across trampled dust and through settling dusk. In Amos’s imagination, the deserts that ancient monk made his home were not dissimilar from his own Texas plains, and praying familiar words aloud offered some measure of comfort on those haunted stretches.
by Cara McMillan
Everyone puts their faith in something, whether that be religion, philosophy, a wise friend, or even themselves. When we put our faith in something we consult it, seek guidance from it, and create expectations around it. American society increasingly identifies as post-Christian, so we must ask the question: what is our civilization trusting in?
by Molly Tompkins
The rush and roar of the wave crashes through Leila. Wind beats through her imagination, and she plunges underwater to behold the kaleidoscopic shimmer of the sun breaking through the membrane of the wave. “The sun is rising,” her mother calls…
by Margaret Grace Voelter
The stars have prompted both religious and scientific inquiry for thousands of years. As Plato once wrote, “This study [astronomy] certainly compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to those higher things.” (Plato) For the majority of human history, people considered the fields of science and religion to be one and the same. However, in our modern era, most consider them to be mutually exclusive. When did this paradigm begin to crumble, and what caused it? With a glance at history, it is apparent that this conflict originated with the study of our solar system, when Renaissance astronomers' technological innovations revealed that the universe was ordered contrary to the Catholic Church’s doctrine.
by Jessica Jang
Just like the last notes of a cadence
Man is caught in growing ebbs and fast flows,
the present,
a moving melody that taunts in its
tension
running towards harmonic resolution yet
remaining, lingering, in the time before those final notes ring sweet.
by Isaiah Pyle
Despite its reputation of glorifying the occult and taking an anti-religious stance, heavy metal contains and revolves around Biblical and Christian imagery. In fact, Christianity is both explored and proclaimed by numerous songs within the genre, illustrating the universal desire for truth and salvation that transcends all else.
by Birdie Anderson
On a summer day in Georgia, with peach-sticky fingers and wiry limbs strong from days on the trail, four kids set off on a final hike down Tallulah Gorge.
(Their parents and grandparents were with them as well, but that doesn’t sound quite as adventurous, does it).
by Deborah Chu
“Burning the midnight oil.” “Burning the candle at both ends.” Or to put these sayings into modern terms: “pulling an all-nighter.” Phrases such as these roll into our daily conversations as easily as melting wax rolls down the sides of a candle. In our culture that values high productivity, speed, and instant results, deprioritizing sleep, rest, and self-care has become common. In college especially, where we control our schedules and find ourselves exposed to many exciting opportunities and experiences, biting off more than we can chew becomes disturbingly easy—at the expense of our sleep and well-being.
by Zach Lacy
The labyrinthine depths of Tlön invite us inward, towards a world where the very fabric of the universe is malleable to the minds of man. Thus, it leaves us to face the blurred lines between perception and reality: a concept not unfamiliar to our own world and its philosophical traditions. In his short story entitled “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges examines the rational consequences of realism and idealism in a highly plastic world. Created by a secret society of intellectuals, the fictional world of Tlön represents a foil to our own world. Tlön embraces idealism wholly, with a metaphysical structure lacking any material existence. This world relies solely on perception: what is not perceived simply does not exist. The language of Tlön embraces this ideal, as “there are no nouns in Tlön,” but merely “impersonal verbs…with an adverbial value” (Borges 8). Borges exemplifies this concept further, for in Tlön there is no “word ‘moon,’ but there is a verb which in English would be ‘to moon’ or ‘to moonate’” (Borges 8). This rejection of the material extends into every crevice of the Tlönian’s being, rejecting any notion of a material world into even their language. Borges builds this world as the antithesis of our own, and yet this conception of reality doesn’t seem so far from the one many know.