The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected by a leading writer in the field, making the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005 includes Mary Gordon • Natalie Goldberg • Oliver Sacks • Ptolemy Tompkins • Patricia Hampl • Gary Snyder • Charles Johnson • Harvey Cox • Todd Gitlin • Bill McKibben • Philip Levine • W. S. Merwin • and others Philip Zaleski, editor, is the author of The Recollected Heart, The Book of Heaven, and, most recently, Prayer: A History (with Carol Zaleski). He is a senior editor of Parabola and a research associate in religion at Smith College. Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, the illustrated fable Crow and Weasel, and several essay and short story collections, including About This Life and Resistance. He has received the National Book Award and other honors. Forget about spiritual, this is some of the best recent American writing, period. Culling from everything from the Sun and American Soldier to the New Yorker and Christianity Today , Zaleski amasses a treasure trove demonstrating one of the most extraordinary things about American thought--that some of the best of it happens to be spiritual. Whether it's Brooks Haxton reflecting upon his maternal grandfather's morocco Bible, whose pages are "translucent with the oil and dark still with the dirt of his right hand," or Jean Bethke Elshtain recalling her thrifty childhood in "You Kill It, You Eat It," the act of honoring one's parents appears here as both profound and deeply spiritual. When entomologist Margaret Erhart anguishes over the dilemma of having to kill insects to study them, and self-admittedly nonreligious Todd Gitlin reports on cremations in the Indian city of Varanasi on the river Ganges, each spurs reflection on how powerfully spiritual thought can emerge in everything from the most mundane to the most uncommon of human experiences. Donna Chavez Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "The collection is a thought-provoking and often poignant read." Introduction One benign, summer morning I departed a small tent camp, pitched on the back of a valley glacier, and headed with a few friends for an embayment a couple of miles away in the La Gorce Mountains, in the interior of Antarctica. We were curious about the place, an unnamed natural amphitheater we'd examined through binoculars some weeks earlier. A curving wall rose sharply from the valley floor on three sides, towering over a dark expanse of frost- shattered porphyry and other igneous and sedimentary rock that had fallen, over dozens of millennia, from the walls and serrated ridge above, or been pushed up from the glacial ice below this rock barren. It was a clear day of unusually still air. By now, at the end of a forty-five-day field season, the six of us were so accustomed to the steady cold I can't recall a specific temperature. It must have been around 0°F. The few people who have actually traveled in the interior of Antarctica have all done so recently and their journeys have been carefully recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey; so it's possible to say, with a high degree of certainty, that no one had ever been where we were headed. The La Gorce Range, with its many unnamed peaks, shoulders its way through the continent's permanent ice cover about 225 miles north of the South Pole. The vast, dead- slow river of ice, flowing off the polar plateau, around this range, and toward the edge of the continent, buries the lower seven thousand feet of these mountains. The upper several thousand feet are bare, wind-blasted rock and steep snowpack. Eying our destination from camp and scrutinizing the topographic map, we guessed that the only problems we might face in our traverse would be a crevasse field, which we could skirt, and the steep pitch of an ice wall where Klein Glacier, on which we were camped, curved around the base of Kessens Peak, the valley's southeast portal. Like a river streaming around a boulder, an ice sheet moving around the corner of a mountain range leaves a cavity on the downstream side of any obstruction. It was this side slope of the passing glacier that we would have to descend to reach the mouth, about four miles across, of this deep amphitheater. The pitch of the ice wall raised a few eyebrows but was not perilous to navigate. We descended, crossed the ice apron to the foot of the valley, and parked our snow machines at the threshold of the felsenmere, the dozen or so square miles of rock blown clear of snow by perennially strong winds (which happened not to be blowing on this day). My tent mate, John Schutt, the expedition leader, had the same unannounced idea I did. The two of us hiked in a few hundred yards over the angular boulders and rocks, looking for a relatively flat patc