This poem coaxes me to inhabit a story I’ve heard many times, and makes it astonishingly new, summoning me with the urgency of the second-person perspective and the half-answered question of the title. It’s a poem that asks a lot of its reader—nothing less than to experience a mother’s grief at the loss of her…

Since birth, the rhythm of my week has been set by church. Both my parents have held leadership positions in the varied churches we have attended over the years. In one of the many commonplaces of the evangelical testimony, I could easily say that I was indeed trained to be in church “every time the…

For the past five years, I’ve been experimenting with the use of contemplative practices in the classes I teach at UNC Asheville. For a quick overview of the range of contemplative practices being used in higher education today, see The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society’s Tree of Contemplative Practices. On the eve of a…

“How’s your health?” my long-time friend asked me with concern. “The leukemia is creeping toward trouble zone,” I answered, “and I’m not sleeping much, so sometimes I’m pretty wiped. I don’t deal well with physical discomfort.” Then I added, laughing but serious, “I feel ready for eternal life.” That evening I opened to my bookmark…

Among the courses that I teach is Professional Responsibility—Legal Ethics—which is a subject covered on every state bar exam in the country. The professional code of ethics—the Model Rules of Professional Conduct—sets out in statutory form a log of rules that cover such varied topics as candor to the tribunal and third parties, conflicts of…

In this month of painful national and international news, Tania Runyan’s poem “Onesimus” offers a gut-deep breath of brotherhood. The poem recounts the story of Philemon, a new Christian Paul addresses on behalf of Onesimus, both Philemon’s fugitive slave and also a new convert. In “Onesimus,” Runyan singles out, perhaps, the most marginalized and voiceless…

Last September, I was in Philadelphia for the first time since my freshman year of college. In the train station, I paid attention to what was new, though I suspect memory shouldn’t take a conscious effort. I thought it would be easy, that I could walk into the mall, down the escalator (I remembered this…

The kids are home for the summer, but my husband has remained on the same schedule under which we operate during the school year, up at 6:30 a.m., fumbling around the room in the dark, until it seems the thought of me still sleeping is just too much to bear, so he turns on the…

Continued from yesterday. The following is excerpted from Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words, a new memoir by Brian Volck. In the mountain clinics of rural Honduras, where every medicine and piece of equipment arrives by pickup or is carried on our backs, there’s no way to bring all we want or…

The following is excerpted from Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words, a new memoir by Brian Volck. I don’t recall when I first learned of lectio divina, a reading practice rooted in Christian monasticism still followed by contemporary Benedictine monks, nuns, and laypersons. Lectio divina is traditionally divided into four parts: lectio…