Archive

In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and...

The Catholic way is to include, and then sift: wise words from a wise priest that I remembered a few years back when I was reading, in this journal,...

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in 2021, after ­churches had reopened but while many pandemic restrictions remained in place, three priests in my parish celebrated...

Now it was Lent, and we were just forty days from Easter. Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to...

It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the...

“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to...

I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once...

A year ago, with my two small granddaughters in tow, I visited a friend in an assisted living facility. Before her stroke, Terri was a daily communicant in my...

In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist ­Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion...

Then, for three years, I traveled wherever Grace traveled. ­Wherever she went, I went, and after she prayed for my husband in Tarrytown, he wanted to go with me,...

. . . for he will come like a rushing streamwhich the wind of the Lord drives.—Isa. 59:19 On a hazy afternoon in late May 1986, I wait, as...

Six months after he was elected to the Chair of Peter, Pope Francis made one of the most provocative statements of his five-year pontificate. Asked by the Italian Jesuit...

Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based, turns on an act of emotional blackmail. Inoue, a seventeenth-century Japanese magistrate...

By now, everyone who reads contemporary fiction will have heard of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful advisor...

Twenty-three years ago, under the pseudonym Catherine Maurice, a woman wrote a book about recovering her small daughter from autism. Still in print, the book is called Let Me...