the post calvin: Essays 2016-2019

In this collection of essays, forty-four Calvin University graduates under thirty years old share the most interesting and intimate parts of their twenty-first-century lives.

They stride into the fallout of their purity culture childhoods. They share their alcoholism, chronic illnesses, and miscarriages. They canoe the most dan­gerous river in Michigan, build com­munities out of dating apps, and delight in the not-so-simple joys of cooking. 

Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, confessed, “Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.” These writers carry on in Montaigne’s honest tradition. Scattered across the world—Grand Rapids to Manhattan, Honduras to Germany—they take us into their confidence and get political, religious, and personal. They talk about Trump, guns, and being queer. Some reject Christianity; others become clergy. Friends die in this book. Babies are born. Some writers get married (for better and worse), and others stay single. It’s all on the table.

This collection has an expansive range that mirrors the sprawl of millennial life. But “sprawl” suggests laziness, and the lives in these pages are anything but. These writers are searching, striving, failing, learning, and sometimes succeeding—all the while trying to make things better, even if they don’t agree what “better” really is.