It’s November, and I am forty-seven, a newly single mother, driving home to North Carolina from a conference in Pittsburgh, where I spoke with other women writers on a panel called “A Wilderness of Her Own.” It’s drizzling in West Virginia, and I’m gazing at the fog and branches around me almost to my peril…

It has to be one of the most extraordinary Christmas trees ever imagined. Twelve feet high, glowing in brilliant oranges, this “tree” was created by artist Ben Quilty out of the lifejackets of Syrian refugee children who had safely reached the island of Lesbos on boats. For the current Christmas season, this sculpture has been…

“My church and my country could use a little mercy now,As they sink into a poisoned pit it’s going to take forever to climb out.They carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down.I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now.”                  …

“Churches are the mansions of the poor,” the novelist Oscar Hijuelos stated in his 1995 paean to New York ethnic Catholicism, Mr. Ives’ Christmas. Lately, though, it seems that in many cities, the churches are now simply becoming mansions. In Washington, D.C., where I live, the gray stone church, with its sober round tower, has…

The facades of the buildings in Vilnius, Lithuania, are captivating, with peeling paint and doors covered in colorful bursts of blue, pink, green, and golden yellow and bricks crumbling where the building and sidewalk meet and graffiti scattered all over the ancient architecture. When I visited for the first time last summer, it looked to me like a…

There’s a highway that goes the strange way through New York State. It sends you out west and eventually into Pennsylvania, but not before a kind of slingshot move that starts up around Schenectady and then skitters down into the southern central part of the state. This is Interstate 88, a roughly 117 mile stretch…

“Van Gogh did not sell a single painting during his lifetime, became increasingly unhinged, and shot himself at the age of thirty-seven.” So writes poet Jeanne Murray Walker in her engaging essay in the current issue of Image (#98), “Sandals on the Ground: My Pilgrimage with the Sonnet.” Walker’s sentence about Van Gogh reminds me…

One night after rifling through my tilting mountain of bedside books and coming up short, I sifted through my husband’s stash. I pilfered The Ghosts of K2, the library book he’d been reading about the first decades of expeditions to climb the second highest mountain in the world. While I attempted K2, my husband moved…

Of the Western faith traditions, Catholicism most strongly bears the marks of our pagan past. Sites sacred to local pagan religions were “adopted” by the church as it spread, and Pope Gregory I, circa 600, even encouraged his charges to utilize such places in the conversion effort. The Catholic panoply of saints resembles pagan polytheism,…

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. … the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.  (2 Cor. 3, NRSV)   I…