Last summer we revisited Santa Fe and the Glen Workshop, an annual pilgrimage of sorts, searching for renewal of body and soul. In pondering my faith, I sometimes ask myself, “Am I building on a rock, or on a slippery beach that reconfigures itself every time the tide changes?” Maybe something in between—sandstone, friable and…

I have had three or four truly excellent teachers in my life—teachers who not only made lights come on for me, but who challenged and pushed me so far beyond boundaries that were previously comfortable that I was never able to return. David Miller of Mississippi College was one of those teachers for me. When…

At the end of next week, barring some kind of family emergency, my husband and I will load the children into the car and head up Interstate 95 to attend my twenty-fifth reunion at a boarding school in Massachusetts. For my husband, as is the case with most spouses, I guess, this is one of…

“Why,” asks the title of a recent movie review by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir, “are Christian movies so awful?” He asks this after watching Soul Surfer, a film targeted at American evangelicals, about a one-armed surfer girl. It’s supposed to be a true story, insofar as anything can be true once it has been plucked…

Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her? —Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” Last Wednesday, my grandmother, my father’s mother, died. She had been fighting lung cancer…

Last week, I witnessed the Big Bang. More specifically—I enjoyed a sneak preview of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The film’s publicity company will chop off my hands if I publish a review before opening day. But I’ll tell you this: Malick’s movie did more than catapult me back in time to witness the…

One thing that we know about ourselves as a race is that we do not deal well with uncertainty, open endings, fades to black. We want the orchestra to swell, the curtain to be run down, and the actors to come to the apron and receive their applause. We require a child-like reassurance that everything…

Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities. And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.…

There is no more divisive topic in Christendom than the music we employ to worship the creator of the universe. We may co-exist in uneasy unity in the midst of our differing views of the Eucharist, or baptism, or Rob Bell, but nothing predicts a surefire church schism more accurately than a preening church organist…

As I write this, Mother’s Day is nearly upon us. It can be a painful day for some women who are my age or older, and, like me, childless. For me, the day doesn’t arouse any emotion other than regret that once again I’ve failed to get a card for my mom. My husband and…