The Hugo Award nominations are open! From now until March 16th, if you are eligible to vote for the Hugos, and you like my stuff, you can throw my hat in the ring by considering one of my Tor.com articles in the Best Related Work category. (Or throw the hat of one of my gorgeous Tor.com colleagues, if you prefer? THROW A HAT, is my point.)

Here are some pieces of mine that I came close to liking and not wanting to rewrite from scratch. Nearly all of them are about religion in some form? It’s almost as if the ongoing moral horror of the last few years has driven me into thinking about Big Questions even more than usual?

Be the Angel You Want to See in America: The World Only Spins Forward by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois is a review of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, an oral history gathered together by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois. It’s a remarkable work of theater/queer/intellectual history, and I used my review to get slightly more personal that I usually do about how Tony Kushner’s work has shaped my own writing and philosophy.

All of the Tor.com staff writers collectively lost their shit when The Last Jedi came out. As it often does, my shit-losing came in the form of a fairly academic essay: The Evolution of Religious Iconography in Star Wars.

In 2018 a miracle occurred, and Easter fell on April Fool’s Day. I took advantage of this by writing about the moral philosophy of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Over the summer I did a crazy swan dive into the history of the U.S. space program, the Russian space program, Cosmism, and pretty much every ding-dang movie with an astronaut in it. One of the results was Religion and Rocketry: How German Theology and Russian Mysticism Shape Our View of Outer Space.

The Tor.com crew took a field trip to see Harry Potter and The Cursed Child on Broadway, and I, well…I wrote a whole bunch about religion. Again. I can’t help it when J.K. Rowling is just going to poke C.S. Lewis in such obvious ways! Here’s Moral Kombat: How Narnia and Harry Potter Wrestle with Death and Rewrite Christianity.

Finally, we celebrated the release of The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition with an Ursula K. Le Guin-themed week, and I contributed A Heroic Journey Inward: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore. I discuss my own history with depression while looking at how Le Guin deals with depression and despair in the context of a quest narrative. This one, being more personal, was a bit tougher to write than the avalanche of academia and historical weirdness above.

Thank you as always for reading!