Servant of God Élisabeth Leseur has been called the Thérèse of Lisieux for married women. Her husband was a crabby atheist.
BUILDING ON THE CORNERSTONE
From a friend today: “I think of Psalm 127, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders build in vain.’ Isn’t this the truth! Much of it, perhaps most of it we did build with Him, but there are foundational errors that need correcting.”
VISIO DIVINA: ARTIST MEL AHLBORN’S MADONNA ICONS
Artist Mel Ahlborn has painted a series of Madonna icons, each associated with a contemporary disease: Addiction, Dementia, B.C….and now Pandemic Madonna.
AS THE WORLD TURNS
Catholicism for me is van Gogh saying, “I love my studio in the same way that a sailor loves his ship.” It’s Maria Callas saying, “I prepare myself for rehearsals the way I would for marriage”…
USE LESS, SHARE MORE
“[M]ost of the want and suffering we see in our world today originates not from earth’s inability to provide but from our own inability to share….It is because so many of us consume far beyond our needs that a great many of us are left with almost nothing.”
From award-winning geobiologist Hope Moore’s “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here.”
USE ME
Robert Macfarlane, author of “Mountains of the Mind,” observes that continued agitation excites the climber, the huntsman, the gambler, the warrior. I’d like to add the writer to that list.
THIS SEEMS A HOME
Santa Monica’s ROSEGALLERY is currently featuring a thought-provoking online exhibition called “This Seems A Home.” “Where does it come from, this longing for home?” we’re invited to consider.
INCLINE THE EAR OF THY HEART
Join the Portsmouth Institute’s Virtual Summer Conference on Saturday, June 20. The Conference takes as its theme “Incline the Ear of Thy Heart: Rediscovering the Virtues and Practices of the Christian Life.” I’ll be speaking on the subject of “Pilgrimage.”
WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS
“Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form, that takes us by the hand and leads us into the dream world of our collective past from which we emerge more wholly ourselves. With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this, bringing back to life the rural paper mill town of not only her youth but America’s, too”….
AN OPERA SINGER’S JOURNEY
Every artist has mentors, benefactors, guides. Opera singer Julia Rolwing, whose specialty is Wagner, talks about some of hers who helped along the way.
OUR NATION’S SACRED PROMISE
Conversion of heart around racial injustice encompasses a wide spread. Here’s a recent sentencing update of Liz McAlister, 80, the oldest of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
CHEKHOV ON CULTURED PEOPLE
Anton Chekhov’s first order of the day: “[Cultured people] respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others.”
BACK TO THE BUSINESS OF LIFE: RESURRECTION CEMETERY
As the world emerges slowly from lockdown, the first public place I visited was a cemetery. Ah–people!
G.K. CHESTERTON ON THE COLOR WHITE
wrote G.K. Chesterton: “God paints in many colours; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”