Spike, Issue 88: Spirituality

Spike, founded in 2004, is a place for criticism and unconventional ideas, mixing writing on themes urgent and forever unresolved, from “Web3” and “After Beauty” to “Plants” and “Patriarchy.” As a print quarterly, a digital broadside, and an event space, Spike offers a soapbox to cultural critics and literary essayists to chronicle our time in thought. Spike is also visually splashy, by turns pushy, poetic, unexpected – and not shy to start an argument. Published quarterly by the artist Rita Vitorelli, Spike is one of the last remaining independent art magazines.

In this issue:

For our Summer 2026 issue, amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike asked: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured? The answers are eclectic, emphatic, and most of all personal: Johanna Hedva’s essay about the human voice’s part in the divine; portraits of mystic artists Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natasha Tontey, and Santiago Yahuarcani by Isis Semaj-Hall, Riar Rizaldi, and Miguel A. López; Jamieson Webster’s psychoanalytic look at Renaissance painting’s body of Christ; a spiritual history of perfumes by Élisabeth de Feydeau; Patrick McGraw’s soulful reading of America’s (perhaps) greatest living author, Joy Williams; queries of Gen Z’s search for God by Lamorna Ash, the disappearance of atheism by Steven Phillips-Horst, and a new form of contemplation by Aodhan Madden; and LIFEMAXXING recommendations to purge the soul, sometimes devilishly. Plus, some backpage words of wisdom from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Devotion and humiliation are holy.”