Anthony R. Lusvardi has been a Jesuit for ten years and is currently engaged in theology studies at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. In addition to his work at St. Francis Mission in South Dakota, his Jesuit training has included stints in Haiti and northeast India. Before joining the Jesuits, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan. His fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, most recently Dappled Things and the North Dakota Quarterly. Our final judge Marilyn McEntyre writes:
"This story of a priest who serves parishioners on a South Dakota reservation begins with a night-time phone call that signifies the irregular rhythm of need-and-response that governs his working life. With skillful understatement and flickers of gentle laughter at his own stumblings in situations of complex sorrow, the writer reflects on how the prophet Jeremiah provides help in hard times. He offers readers a lively vision of what hope looks like in bleak places. His unsentimental and deeply compassionate look at life on the reservation—harsh and spare and laced with drugs—finds its grounding in the prophetic text that he recalls with the unpretentious specificity of an invested reader and the informed gratitude of one who has gone there again and again to find what he needed in order to keep an open heart and focus sustained attention, one by one, on those whose stories happen at the margins."
You can read Jeremiah on the Plains in issue 40.Comments will be approved before showing up. We don't allow comments that are disrespectful or personally attack our blog writers.