“At its core, Jenny Feldon’s “Churchgoing” is a study in fear—tangible and intangible, rational and irrational—explored through the lens of a narrator who lives consumed by anxiety about the unforeseen, to such a degree that she is relieved when one misfortune outlaws the possibility of another. Better to have her fiancé leave her, she reasons, than to lose whatever life they might have built together to random tragedy: “Our children—precocious, beloved—could not be gunned down in their elementary school classrooms if they’d never been born,” she explains, and thus remains ensconced in solitude, made safe by her distance from others and from emotional attachment. In churches, where she can remain transient and anonymous, she finds brief peace and security, and Feldon describes in sublime detail all the quiet ritual of these spaces. “Faded velvet curtains rustling in the dusty breeze” and a “sun-soaked prayer room with benches made of pine” lull the narrator into thinking that, perhaps, there are places in which she might find some succor from imagining all the devastating paths down which life might lead her—until Feldon, in a master stroke of understated tension, disrupts all our expectations about the gulf between safe and unsafe, between the sacred and the human. “Churchgoing” is a brutally authentic portrait of fear and faith and all their intersections, and a phenomenally unsettling portrayal of one woman’s search for solace in an ever-unpredictable world.”