Posts Tagged ‘memoir’
It Is Your Duty to Answer Us: An Interview with the Author of The Ungrateful Refugee
November 26, 2019
After three decades, I was going to summon the courage to return to camps and to witness this story that I had lived, and to see how it had changed, and to let it ignite my memories so that I could say something important and helpful.
Read MoreThe Unexpected Rigors of Sister Helen Prejean’s River of Fire
November 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…
Read MoreThe Place of the Imagination in Spiritual Experience
April 8, 2019
Does the imagination play a role in spiritual experience, I asked. How about in religious experience? On a Thursday morning late in the semester, a dozen undergraduates–honors students–and I gathered in a circle in the Laurel Forum, a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one wall, another wall all windows opening onto the campus quad. A…
Read MoreA Theologian Reads Karl Ove Knausgaard
December 19, 2017
My reading habits, I confess, aren’t literary. I probably lack the training and the gifts necessary to make them so. Instead, they’re theological. I read like a porn addict scours the Internet. Only my pornography is God-talk and my Internet some piece of literature or another. Thus I’m sent into near ecstasy when Stavrogin and…
Read MoreThe Eye Behind the Camera: Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson
April 20, 2017
When we first see the close-up of the dead bird on the ground, we wonder why. It’s only a few scenes later that we return to the site of the bird to see two young children, twin brother and sister, asking their mother and grandfather if they can go outside to bury the dead bird.…
Read MoreThe Neglected Garden, Part I
August 15, 2016
When my father built the house where I was born, the land was flat and there was little vegetation on it. It had once been the Curran family’s cotton plantation, my mother later told me—sold and subdivided for a row of little Cape Cods and ranch houses, all arrayed in pastel asbestos siding. Including the…
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