In the late 1960s, a friend in my graduate school program was gay. But at that time, there was no such thing as “in” or “out” of the closet. There wasn’t even a closet…or there couldn’t have been one huge enough to hold all the gay people who had to keep their sexual lives secret. Not even a barn would have been big enough. Maybe a stadium…

Let’s just take some of the poets in the special issue of Image (#85) on “Evolution and the Imago Dei.” (And since Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Sì came out nearly the same time as Image, I hear the Pope conversing with the poets.)

None of us chooses a religion because of its dogma.

I’m a word-watcher. I like noticing which words are winning the popularity contest in our general culture, then tracing back how (and why) they achieved this winning position.

My daily bike-ride is not picturesque. It’s along a bike trail that’s squeezed between a highway and a tattered string of small factories and beaten down neighborhoods. The bike trail is usually fairly abandoned when I ride it. Occasionally I’ll pass another biker or someone walking. But I can always count on passing the man…

In the final scene of Anne Tyler’s novel Back When We Were Grownups, the uncle of protagonist Rebecca gives a speech at the party she has arranged for his 100th birthday. Throughout the novel, he has been an endearingly complex character, quite mentally alert for his age but with spells of irritability or of dissociation…

One of the students in my Glen Online course, “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice,” emailed me to ask what exactly I meant by “strolling along with a poem.” In the lecture for the lesson she was working on, I’d said that “I sometimes read a poem as if I were taking a stroll through it…

Monastic communities have traditionally encouraged lay associates: people drawn not to join the monastery but to absorb themselves in its spirituality and adapt as much of its practice as possible while living “in the world.” Creatively taking this concept of lay associates into the internet age, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, have launched “Monasteries…

Sometimes with my Christmas cards I include a favorite seasonal poem. So consider this post a greeting card for the season. First, I can’t resist sharing the poem that has been my meditation this Advent. I always treasure Advent’s special spirit of hushed longing. This year I’ve found it expressed in a poem not written…