Be sure you get tickets for two of this month’s new releases: Frost/Nixon and Doubt. Both films were adapted from celebrated stage plays by their original playwrights. Both are dramatic, intense, and powerfully acted. And you’ll find that each follows a crusader obsessed with exposing the ugly truth by wringing an admission of guilt from…

My mother is an exhibitionist. Her freedom with her body is beautiful to me, signaling a lack of vanity, a comfort with aging, a kind of joy in the healthy softness of her small frame, which bore all three of my sisters and myself and is just now beginning to show the creped swags of…

Friday, November 21, is my daughter’s feast day. Sometimes called “name days,” these celebrations—often featuring special meals, a cake, perhaps a small gift—of the memorial day of the saint for whom one is named, remain a tradition for some Catholic and Orthodox families. When the kids were younger, they welcomed feast days. Those were the…

No doubt I wasn’t the only one in America on Election Night who had this thought, but still, so resonant was the effect that it felt like a revelation all my own: with uncanny biblical equivalence, exactly 40 years had passed—not 39, not 41, or, for that matter, 25 or 200—from Martin Luther King’s “I’ve…

Guest Blogger I live in a pretty college town in a lush, green valley, in a state famous for its forests and magnificent coastline. The timber industry has held sway here since the late 1800s. Forestry has its own college at the university, and it’s not uncommon to wait at a traffic light behind a…

My husband Ben grew up Catholic; I grew up Southern Baptist. As love stories like ours go, it was probably inevitable that we would meet at an Episcopalian church. On our first date, he bought me my first beer; shortly thereafter, he fell asleep, drunk, on my bed, where partygoers put coats on top of…

I missed the film Chocolat when it ran the theaters in 2000, so just recently first saw it on video at home. I was enchanted, as the film intends me to be. To my mind, it’s a story about incarnational joy—and the transformative power of the generous dispersal of the luscious in our lives. For…

In a photograph from her recent wedding, my friend Tara stands on one side of the empty dance floor. On the other, Bryan, her groom, leans forward in his chair. Tara is about to reach out her hand in a gesture of invitation. No doubt about it—he’s ready to respond. Their gazes are locked in…

The wisteria was succulent and blue last spring when I met an older colleague, a woman I am prone to revere, for lunch at Dupont Circle’s Iron Gate Inn. Iron Gate is a restaurant I had passed and peered into, wondering what it would be like to eat a meal under its trellis of climbing…

Tempting as it is, I mostly resist the urge to sacralize my preferences and hallow my velleities. So while I’ve heard that looking “deep” into Dark Side of the Moon will reveal a kind of religious experience stated in an inverse way, I can only reply: “But looking at it in another, more realistic way,…