Jered Mabaquiao
I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. It was common to hear things like, “your body is a temple” or “the Holy Spirit lives in you.” This language shaped a lot of my thinking—ideas about what sort of vessel I was (or becoming) sometimes flooded my mind. Surrounded by congregants, even family members, that deliberately or implicitly, reminded me of my shortcomings, I wondered how would my soul ever be saved? While a lot of time and space has appropriately put distance between myself and these thoughts, Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary (2026) resurrects an important question for me: “What would you do to save your soul?”
A reliquary is a special container meant to hold and display holy or divine relics, often from saints or other significant religious historical figures. Whitten’s Reliquary reframes this object by asking what it means for a body to be a vessel for something divine and what happens to our “original soul” when it is replaced by something else. Whitten transforms the idea of the reliquary into something intimate and unsettling: an exploration of a body asked to house a divine terror; a relinquishing of one’s agency to a higher power. The novel’s exploration reanimates my own long-standing question of how a person learns to distinguish salvation from surrender.
