My mother’s teeth were kept in a bottlemarked with the sign of the cross. I usedto shake it till they’d rattle,interest and childish horror fused.They weren’t her teeth. They were mine.My brothers’ and my sisters’, too.The one’s we’d shed, as sharks do,pearls we’d surrendered to . . . . Continue Reading »
The last time I was in America, which was last autumn, I visited the battlefield at Little Bighorn. It was a beautiful snowy day. The landscape was vast and white and still. When we pulled into the battlefield site, hardly anyone was there. A couple of park rangers, a few other visitors. It made the . . . . Continue Reading »
You get the best first impression of Poundbury on a bright summer’s afternoon, when the air is heavy with heat and the light begins to turn gold. You’re in Dorset, a rural county on the south coast of England, close enough to the sea for the light to have that maritime clarity. Driving from Lyme . . . . Continue Reading »
I sat in my chair, looking through the window across the wide plain to the towers of Lüneburg. Everyone was silent. The therapist turned to the older woman. “What do you see?”—“The Elbe River.” Then she began to tell: Her father, whom she had never met, had died in Russian captivity . . . . Continue Reading »
Once, the story goes, man stood at the center of the universe. He looked in the mirror and saw a masterpiece: “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty . . .” He looked to history and saw the hand of Providence guiding the species from the Garden of Eden to the splendors of Christendom. He . . . . Continue Reading »
My father holds a panel of glassbetween us: we are both bathed blue.Wordlessly, we let the light passthrough. Where blade scores, glass breaks true. Cut pieces are placed side by side.Burnished, their edges touch through foiland lead. Coils of thin smoke dividethe air above us. From such has come . . . . Continue Reading »
I appreciated Fr. Lusvardi’s excellent and most thoughtful article “Screens and Sacraments” (November 2024), seeing how online Masses appear to be treating the holy things of Christ in an uncomfortably irreverent way. But I wonder if his apparent comfort with broadcasting the Liturgy of the . . . . Continue Reading »
joins in to discuss his new book, Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized. Continue Reading »
The handcuffed Mangione, for his part, clean-shaven and wearing his orange jail jumpsuit with neatly belted panache, looked like a martyr. He looked like Jesus Christ being led to Pontius Pilate. Continue Reading »
joins in to discuss his new book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated. Continue Reading »
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