When I discovered Battistello Caracciolo’s The Calling of Saint Matthew seven years after my return to Catholicism, I was experiencing an ebb in my faith. I...
Spirituality
Let me tell you about Maria. Maria is a white woman in her late 50s who cleans toilets at a major sports arena. She lugs three bulky duffel bags bursting with...
My initial encounter with the 17th-century Spanish painter Juan de Valdés Leal’s Pietà came at an auspicious moment in my spiritual journey. After having...
As a priest and an astronomer, Jesuit Father George Coyne bridges the worlds of faith and science, but he’s quick to acknowledge that they serve two different...
I am in my garden, squatting in the dirt like a medieval peasant, as around me rise the complex smells of lichen and mineral, exhalations of earthworm and...
When I was little, I was very shy. Once I went with my cousin Kathy to her friend Linda’s house. We knocked and walked into the kitchen, where Linda’s mother...
The movie Shadowlands is the story of C. S. Lewis and his wife Joy. At one point in the film, after finding out Joy’s cancer has gone into remission, one of...
Wash dishes Even if it is only breakfast dishes you do by hand, consider it an opportunity. You need not pray a psalm—in any ordinary sense—in order to make...
There is a rhythm to pipe smoking, a ritual even, one that allows you, if you let it, to enter into a state of contemplation. You must pack the pipe first, and...
Driving on a paved road not far from home last summer, I saw an injured snake, hit by a car, stuck by its open wound to the road. It was curling and writhing...
