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The Unexpected Rigors of Sister Helen Prejean’s River of Fire

By Caroline LangstonNovember 11, 2019

When my mother was still alive, one of the stories she used to tell was about the role of Catholics in the desegregation of my Mississippi Delta hometown during the 1960s. One white priest, a “Father Love,” she said, had come to town to be in residence at St. Francis, the “black Catholic church,” and…

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Little Girls

By Caroline LangstonAugust 15, 2019

It wasn’t until I read about the school uniforms that I thought the Jeffrey Epstein case had anything to do with me. The story broke right before we went on our too-short summer vacation to the borrowed house overlooking the blue Atlantic. There, I sat on the deck with my laptop and read all the…

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Speedboat and the Quest for Truth

By Caroline LangstonApril 17, 2019

The cell phone on the conference room table in London buzzed in the middle of the meeting, and the man glanced down at it, mid conversation. “My God,” he said. “They’ve arrested Assange.” A block away, at the Palace of Westminister, protesters on the sidewalk held signs either for or against Brexit: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!…

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Publishing, Marie Kondo, and the 30 Books Only ‘Crisis’

By Caroline LangstonJanuary 23, 2019

Three weeks into 2019, I haven’t even managed to see the trailer for the new Tidying Up With Marie Kondo show on Netflix, much less watch the thing. That’s not the case for most Americans, I gather—at least those with high-speed internet connections, who apparently gulped down the eight-episode series with vigor. And the series had barely…

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Waiting for Nothing to Happen

By Caroline LangstonOctober 17, 2018

When I was in my twenties, toward the end of a not-especially-dissolute but nonetheless untethered youth, there was a period of a few months when I spent a lot of time with a man who had been the big local rock DJ when I was in high school. He had moved into my threadbare downtown…

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Cathedrals of Consumption

By Caroline LangstonAugust 30, 2018

Many years ago now, not long after I had been received into the Orthodox Church, I had a dream that has remained vivid: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, our chief celebration of the Eucharist and main Sunday service, is being celebrated right next to the escalators in a Neiman Marcus store. In the…

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I Hate Summer

By Caroline LangstonJuly 19, 2018

For the past several days—until today, alas—we’ve been having a spell of entirely uncharacteristic weather in the Washington, D.C. area. The days have been in the 70s and the nights, pure bliss: in the high 60s, a temperature for open windows and a thick breeze that feels like it’s straight from the Atlantic, and I…

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I Feel Bad About My Neck

By Caroline LangstonJune 19, 2018

I feel bad about my neck. Those are not my words; they’re the title of writer/comic Nora Ephron’s final book about the indignities of aging. And I did a double take when I looked the publication date up: I Feel Bad About My Neck is already ten years old. Such is the passage of time.…

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The Life-Changing Magic of Picking Nits

By Caroline LangstonMay 16, 2018

I was at work last Thursday when I received the call from the school that every parent dreads: My eight-year-old daughter had been discovered with nits in her hair. Actually, she was not alone. A bunch of children in the class had lice, and the school had pressed administrative staffers into corralling children for impromptu…

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Occasions of Grace

By Caroline LangstonMarch 20, 2018

My old friend Gina, one of the loveliest ladies I know, lived for years with her family in a large co-op apartment overlooking Riverside Drive in New York City. The building, on its lower floors, was like a wedding cake swathed in white icing, but once you made it through the dark Gothic lobby and…

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