Once upon a time when my mother was a kindergarten teacher, a little girl walked into her classroom and brightly announced, "my grandma blew up in the space shuttle!" What? The incongruence seemed humorous at first. Why on earth would a child say such a thing? It was late January, 1986. The tenth mission of … Continue reading The Power of Story in Dark Times
When I was a young mother trying to finish a Bachelor of Arts in English, I relished my Tuesday evening class at the local college. The English department head, a kind woman with twinkling eyes and exacting standards, required us to read a book a week and come prepared to spend the first 30 minutes … Continue reading “Go and Be Human” with Close Reads: A Podcast for the Incurable Reader
“One year from now, you are likely to be much the same person except for the people you meet and the books you read.” I don’t remember who told me this back when I was young but I never forgot it; it's helped me track my reading year after year ever since. Lately the Goodreads Reading … Continue reading Fiction, News Addiction & The Scandal of Holiness: Standouts from a Reading Year
T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock speaks heavily into our contemporary souls of "time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Who are we, really, aside from our curated Instagram personas, our virtue signals and our self-justifications? What is the truth we hide even from ourselves? In Till … Continue reading C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and the Slow Liberation of Our True Selves
The past few weeks have been gut-wrenching for serious Catholics who must face the reality that the gates of hell had forged deeper inroads into the heart of the Church than our worst fears would have imagined. We wonder how much outrage we can take. How many unsatisfying platitudes and knee-jerk one-liners we must endure in … Continue reading Scandal and Self-Definition: The Choice Between Fight or Flight
I love book lists. On the other hand, I don't. I love them because I'm always looking for my next read, but lists of "must-reads" can also bring me down. There's never enough time to read everything I want to; I'm still missing out on the "essential reads" of a lifetime and I don't want … Continue reading Memoir as Medicine: Recommended Recollections for Summer Reading
My Grandma Ted was a working class woman. Her husband was a textile factory loom fixer and she was a secretary. They raised my mom and uncle, scraping for every cent. A whiz at shorthand, Grandma's boss once asked her to take notes at a business meeting at an expensive hotel. When she went to the … Continue reading Links to Booklist Builders for a Still-Incomplete Education
