Present Day, July 22, 2026
In 1986 Andy Partridge of XTC wrote a song called Dear God. It is structured as a letter: the writer addresses God directly, describing the suffering of the world, asking how this suffering is compatible with either God’s existence or God’s goodness, and ultimately declining to believe in a God who would design or permit what the world contains.
I heard it when it was released and I recognized the question immediately. I have been asking the same question since the winter of 1473 when a bishop called my curiosity damnation and I walked away from his library into a city that was, for a few more years, willing to treat the question as a question rather than a heresy.
What Partridge understood, and what I find precise in the song, is that the question is not hostile to the sacred. It is the opposite: it takes seriously the claims made on behalf of the sacred and examines whether the evidence is consistent with those claims. This is not atheism. This is the same thing I was doing in Rinaldo’s library at fifteen: reading carefully and refusing to accept answers that did not answer anything.
I covered it because it belongs on Sanctified Hunger. It is the most compressed version of the question the album is built around: three and a half minutes, one direct address, the essential problem stated without decoration. It is a bonus track for those who purchase directly from morellarecords.com because it deserves to be heard in context, after the twelve tracks that precede it have established the five centuries of evidence behind the asking.