“Finding Freedom” is the story of how Erin French picked herself up by the bootstraps, begged, borrowed, scavenged, refurbished an old Airstream trailer and opened a popup, made a handshake deal for an abandoned gristmill in rural Maine and bit by bit, breathed a world-famous restaurant into life.
CULTURE
VIVA MAESTRO!: COMPOSER GUSTAVO DUDAMEL
Dudamel’s philosophy, work and life constitute a resounding rebuke to those who maintain that art is a frivolous whim in these dark times.
THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Instead of spouting identity-politics ideology, “New Statesman” columnist Louise Perry turns to evolution, biology, and psychology and asks: What is best for the well-being of women? What do women really need?
MIDWEST AUTUMN
Chicago, Lake Forest, and Oak Park were incredible. But way more important–I made a new friend.
REHABILITATING ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
In this culture of perpetual aggrievement, could it be that we’ve been missing the message that’s right in front of our faces?
DEATHSONG: MEDIEVAL CHANT WITH DR. ELAINE STRATTON HILD
Dr. Hild’s fervent wish is that we might all come to play music, chant, or sing around the bedside of our dying loved ones.
PIANIST MARIA YUDINA: HOLY FOOL
“Yudina was a strange person, and very much a loner.” “Strange things kept happening to her.” “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” Shostakovich observed. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.”
THE SHADOW OF THE SUN
‘Why do you stay here, Father?’I asked. ‘Why don’t you leave?’ He gave the impression of a man in whom some small part had already died. There was already something missing. ‘I cannot,’ he answered. ‘Someone has to guard the church.’
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ST. KEVIN
“The hermitage garden is designed to provide a place where nature, scripture and Glendalough’s history are combined in harmony, delighting the eye, comforting the soul and leading pilgrims to prayer and a deeper awareness of God.”
THAT FEEL WHEN NO GIRLFRIEND
For all their solipsism, these young men are not self-pitying so much as they’re bewildered: by the state of the world, the culture, and the fact that as young males they’re unseen, unwanted, unremarked upon.
KNEADED: L.A. BREAD STORIES
At a buck apiece, everyone can afford puff-puff. “The one thing I always cry about and why I love Los Angeles is that the community we serve is not just one community…the African Chop Truck serves everybody.”
INSIDE MADONNA HOUSE’S LAY COMMUNITY OF LOVE
I visited the house in Combermere several years ago and was awed by the community’s self-sufficiency. They grow or raise almost all of their own food. St. Benedict’s Acres, the community farm, boasts vegetable beds, cows, chickens, and sheep whose wool is sheared, cleaned, dyed, spun, woven and knit into products for gift shops.
MARIPOSAS NOCTURNAS: THE SPLENDOR OF MOTHS
As with a late Beethoven quartet, or a Cézanne still-life, the intensity of the beauty is almost too much to bear.
FLESH AND BONES
To my mind it’s the earliest images that most compellingly evoke the wonder and complexity of the human body. People were closer to God then, more aware of the divine plan. Death was a part of daily life, not hidden away and sanitized.