I've been visiting sisters’ homes across Britain and Ireland, seeking to collaborate with them in reflecting on suffering and its relationship to love.
Fond memories and beautiful places are fine, but they are not all that matters. Indeed, there is a “Catholic way of doing things” when it comes to death.
How did a shy young woman from the suburban Midwest turn into someone brave enough to travel by foot from village to village in the midst of a civil war?
We never admitted that the lake was terrifying, that it was a dark, alluring, fearful hole in the world, more grim than serene. We never said the word “drown."
Canada’s long-standing ban on physician-assisted death is over. Though Canada has a predilection for polite and civil exchange, was the debate heated enough?
Like Twain’s mother, scrawling her thoughts on little scraps of paper, Scott Simon distilled his long hours in the ICU into clipped reflections, rich with meaning.
After he died a bunch of us were playing basketball one night, in one of the parks where we used to play summer-league ball—eight of us. And then this thing happened
My mother was like a hermit crab who was busy moving out of its shell, and then only the shell was left. “Enjoy it, dear,” she said. She took to staring at the sky.
When we visited Frigolet last year, we asked Joël what makes for a vital religious community. “New men,” he replied. Not money, not administrative acumen, but men.
The importance of loving care for persons near the end of life is fundamental in Catholic teaching. But we've embraced a version of love without that obligation.
Current students are taught by lay people. Our teachers were Benedictine monks, and teaching only begins to describe the role those virtuous men played in our lives.
Readers offer a remedy for the church's "unction dysfunction," another disturbing aspect of the Supreme Court's lethal-injection ruling, and more on James Agee.
Set in bombed-out Berlin of 1945, Petzold's 'Phoenix' questions who was guilty, and of what, in the daily workings of the Holocaust—and will there be a reckoning?
Centered around the missing bomber pilot from 'Life After Life,' Atkinson's 'A God in Ruins' examines the interplay of real life and the life of the imagination.
Set on present day Staten Island Eddie Joyce's 'Small Mercies' traces the effect of 9/11 on the families of people living in “the servants’ quarters of New York."
Dying is an adult activity. This has been one of its bigger surprises for me. I find I need to leave behind the child side of myself to go where I now need to go.
Following the Orthodox Church, Francis announces World Day of Prayer's theme; U.S. Bishops don't. Why is Francis silent about mob's "Godfather-like" funeral in Rome?
While my husband snapped photos of the flag, I stood in silent debate with Big Ed. And then I spied another Confederate flag; an unwelcome sensation came over me.
Asleep, she has no idea she is old. // She’s running uphill, no lightfoot, but quite fast /
past the houses and driveways of family friends / toward the higher...
Anne Enright's new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell each has its own floor. Evoking horror, repentance and beatitude, more than 40 African artists exhibit a new look at Dante and divinity.
Often the way our society treats "senior citizens" assumes that as bodies age, individuality decreases. But aren't whiskers and white socks a sign of unique wisdom?
Baxter reads fiction to “see bad stuff happening.” He writes characters who get into serious trouble, and face their own "human wreckage" at someone else's request.
