I spent hours into the night in my small convent room, praying that I would get through the next day's lessons without breaking down or bolting. Bolting from Edward.
A low voice emerged: “Welcome to my home. Please, sit.” My host and I shook hands, and I took the chair opposite. I remember the details because he was a terrorist.
On boarding I realized we’d committed to the wrong car: A subway preacher was in full roar. For a Catholic schoolgirl from Milwaukee, this was quite dramatic.
Relatives of Alzheimer's sufferers are often reminded that the human person is more than memory and mind. We don't easily believe this, until something happens.
Would we be silent at our monastery meals, or would we whisper? Would we hide in our cells or go off on chatty walks in the woods? Both/and, it turned out.
"It’s not you. Well, it’s not me either. It’s the ‘us’ that needs…space," we said in perfect, twinny unison. It was our biggest split since the egg divided.
He sat next to me. I talked about my favorite theologians, prayers, gospels. I showed him my rosary, and asked if he believed in God. And still the bus didn't come.
Msgr. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y García-Menocal, faithful priest, seminary rector, and prolific writer who died January 3, was also a great Cuban patriot.
We moderns pay advanced planning counselors to avoid the fate of St. John of the Cross and to get us to our burial on time, but can we ever be sure it will work out?
In manipulating a mouse’s memory so that it recalls being shocked in a spot where it wasn’t, science has opened the door to the eventual recreation of our pasts.
For the Romans, 'luxuria' was the near-equivalent of Greek hubris. It has behind it the imagery of material excess leading to a diminished sense of cause and effect.
In the art of Diane Arbus, the plays of Shakespeare, or a poem by Mary Karr, my students touch something divine, whose utter familiarity begs to be reverenced.
