For Easter this year, my older sister gave my two-year-old daughter a potential future heirloom to wear to the midnight Paschal liturgy: a dress of cream-colored raw silk, with ruffles, pintucks, and little puffed sleeves that delicately ringed Anna Maria’s arms. The lined skirt puffed out from the high gathered waist, and in pale light…

Having thought, for many years, that I’d spend my life aching for what I’m about to say, it feels strange to write these words down. But I’ve spent the past five months knowing it, knowing it to my bones. I am in love. And there aren’t enough poems or pop songs to capture what I…

In Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a man races against predators and time to rescue his family from a deep pit, which rains threaten to fill. Breathless and bloody, hounded by vicious enemies, he doesn’t know if he’ll make it in time, or if he’ll be able to do anything but fall down and die when he…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…