Walter Schels

Walter Schels is a Bavarian-born photographer best known for his portraits of artists, politicians, and other prominent figures in cultural and intellectual circles. A selection of images from his gripping series “Life Before Death,” a collection of portraits showing people before and directly after their death, illustrates “In the End: Encounters with Death.”

 

Hannah Tennant-Moore

Hannah Tennant-Moore, the author of Wreck and Order, is a writer whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. In “Buddhism’s Higher Power,” she writes about an unlikely but significant part of her Buddhist practice: prayer to God.

 

Clancy Martin

Clancy Martin, who tours the charnel grounds of the contemporary world in “Our Little Tragedy,” is a philosopher and novelist who teaches at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. His latest novel is Bad Sex.

 

Ayya Medhanandi Bhikkhuni

Ayya Medhanandi, the founder and guiding teacher of Sati Saraniya Hermitage in Perth, Ontario, has lived as a Buddhist nun for almost 30 years. A pioneer in the restoration of fully ordained nuns (bhikkhunis) to the Theravada Buddhist lineage, she became a bhikkhuni herself in 2007. Her dharma talk “The Dharma of Snow” appears in this issue.

 

DiegoFer Otero Paredes & Carlos Eduardo Valencia Alfonso

DiegoFer Otero Paredes, a meditator and architect, and Carlos Eduardo Valencia Alfonso, a brain scientist and lay monk in the Soto Zen tradition, are the Colombian-born cartoonist team behind Chuck the Monk, which is featured in this issue’s Parting Words.