I locked myself in my dorm room one weekend my sophomore year of college. I had a double minor in European History and German. In one of my Twentieth Century Europe classes, we’d spent our Friday class watching a documentary about the Holocaust. Though it didn’t contain any “new” information, I was struck as if…

There are many things I’d hoped to write about for this post: those Dominican nuns on Oprah last week; the moral ferocity of Little House on the Prairie; how I finally finished Middlemarch. But every time I sit down to write, the baby inside me starts kicking, and it becomes impossible for me to think…

Do you hear that buzzing sound? That’s the chatter that serves as prologue to the Academy Awards. With the 2010 ceremonies just a few days away, people are tossing around the usual questions: which film will win Best Picture? Will Hollywood veterans take the acting awards, or did newcomers charm the Academy? Then there are…

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II cites the words of the Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid: “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up.” He goes on to refresh our memory of the Platonic notion that beauty resides in the good and the good in beauty.…

In the swelter of Ghana’s heat this past December, I rummaged through my suitcase and found the dress I bought the morning after Rachel’s wedding. It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and my mom cut it…

In the swelter of Ghana’s heat this past December, I rummaged through my suitcase and found the dress I bought the morning after Rachel’s wedding. It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and my mom cut it…

In A Book of Silence, writer Sara Maitland begins her journey into the different kinds of silence by following the example of the desert fathers and the anchorites—she leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye, she traveled to the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights), she forced…

In A Book of Silence, writer Sara Maitland begins her journey into the different kinds of silence by following the example of the desert fathers and the anchorites—she leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye, she traveled to the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights), she forced…

Last weekend I found myself having breakfast at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle with Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns. That Kathleen Norris was there was no surprise to me—she was in town to give a reading at Seattle University, and Greg Wolfe and I had met her to talk about Image’s Oahu Seminar. Scott Cairns…

Last weekend I found myself having breakfast at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle with Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns. That Kathleen Norris was there was no surprise to me—she was in town to give a reading at Seattle University, and Greg Wolfe and I had met her to talk about Image’s Oahu Seminar. Scott Cairns…