“Amalia, I find that my religiousness is a slowly emergent state, one that is entirely drawn to the Anglican church of my childhood, and that the haunted presence of Christ is the essential and defining quality of that state of being. Christianity, for me, is bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself. My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality, armed with little other than the merest hunch or whispered intuition. The defining characteristic of my belief, and which I consider to be a fundamental imperative in my life, is uncertainty. This questioning impulse is the essence of freedom and the creative catalyst that keeps the wheels rotating irrevocably toward God.” - N.C.