In Ephphatha, award-winning author Philip J Martin pushes society’s predispositions and worldly leanings to their logical end in fiction form. Whether mercy, truth, or redemption finds a heart to grapple with depends on the alcoholic, the professor, the grave robber, or the missionary, to name a few. A young boy suffers through life and love when his actions have the power to create a gravitational pull. A teenage girl naively thinks she’s in for the experience of a lifetime when her brother finds backstage passes under his chair at a country music concert. An elderly woman blinded by nostalgia has her life upended by a child. And, in the previously unpublished winner of the 2015 Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction, a fraternity brother’s pranks seemingly backfire until the old farmer makes his greatest move. From the beautiful to the absurd and the simple to the grotesque, these stories lay bare secular underpinnings and the modern topsy-turvy of vice and virtue through whatever means necessary.