When I was barely twenty-one, I spent a brief and difficult period as a postulant in a Carmelite monastery. It didn’t take me long to discover that I lacked a monastic vocation. No one who has felt the throttling sensation of the walls closing in will ever forget it. In the wake of that painful experience, I moved on to graduate school and a different kind of common life: sh (...)
The Last Word
The Common Life
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