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Good Letters

The Veil Between Us

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I looked up from washing dishes one morning last spring and saw a cluster of women in Islamic dress walking away from the school bus stop outside our window. They wandered off by pairs or threes, hijabs with hijabs, niqabs with niqabs, away into the side streets. My hands slowed in the water, my baby…

Balancing my Stuff

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My husband and I are in a flurry of dealing with the “stuff” in our lives. Had to replace the old stove, then the broken couch. Then discovered that the old table lamps next to the old couch were too low for the higher replacement couch…so off we went to shop for new lamps. And…

Acedia, Philip Marlowe, and Me

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In IT terms, I am an asynchronous reader. I frequently read two or three books simultaneously, and that can sometimes lead to strange juxtapositions. I’m currently reading Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It’s the monastic tradition and seedy L.A. detective grit. And it’s creating some fairly bizarre cognitive dissonance…

Bread and Circuses

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I love television. I love movies. I love plays. Depictions of human endeavors, however expressed, through whatever dramatic vehicle, are as engaging as they are enlightening, as “sweet and useful” as any good Horace could want. Plus, the thespian arts have the ruddy hue of populism about them. Even the simplest soul, intimidated by letters…

When It Comes to Love, We’re Beginners

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During a lecture last March, I spoke fondly of a friend whom I had recently lost to cancer. Halfway through the anecdote, I suddenly recognized his wife, the mother of his two young children, in the audience, listening in rapt attention. She was far from home, a surprise visitor. I almost choked. And I suddenly…

I’m Sorry. Aren’t I?

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It’s a simple thing: we do wrong, and we apologize. Simple, yes, but not always easy. Indeed, the very ease of an apology can often signal its insincerity or glibness. Too many apologies are more about saving face, about getting out of the hot seat. For years, I’ve known how it feels to receive those…

Rapture at the Mosque

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On “Rapture Saturday,” I crossed old town Nicosia’s Green Line to wander the Turkish side of this divided city: a shabbier copy of its Cypriot twin, boasting a similar rabbit warren of half-shuttered shops but a higher density of dumpsters and fake leather goods, and so more potent wafts of these sharp perfumes. The wares…

The Tree of Life, Part 2: A Storm of Poetry

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Continued from yesterday.  On her album Fan Dance, Sam Phillips sings: Burning light inside my dreams I wake up in the dark The light is outside my door. Love is everywhere I go. That could be the song of Jack O’Brien, The Tree of Life’s central character. Jack lives with deep wounds—the loss of a…

The Tree of Life, Part 1: “Did You Like It?”

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As the barista took my ATM card, she noticed my notebook and asked, “What are you writing?” “A movie review.” “Oh, really? What movie?” She scribbled my coffee order on a strip of paper and gave it to her coworker. “The Tree of Life.” “I haven’t heard of that. Who’s in it?” “Sean Penn, Brad…

Epithalamium

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My first wedding took place on November 1st, 2003, All Saints’ Day, exactly two years after my fiancé proposed to me in a Waffle House parking lot, before we’d ever even kissed, and I said yes. I was twenty-one, old enough at least to legally have a glass of champagne at the reception. Where I’m from,…

Good Letters

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For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for our blog. Every week gifted writers offer personal essays that make fresh connections between the world of faith and the world of art. We also publish interviews with artists who inspire and challenge us.

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