“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.”
CULTURE
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.
I LIVE NOW, NOT I
In one especially helpful passage, he proposes a new way of thinking about interpersonal conflict. “Well, if Christ is the focus, then everything is about Him and me and not about me and them!”
BACK TO WONDER: NOTES ON A MAGIC SHOW
I try to keep my eyes on his hands, which seem to be in sight at all times. Aha, he partly rolled up his sleeve! Wait, his palm was concealed for a second on an inner thigh! Is it possible for a human being to memorize the order of an entire deck of cards at a glance?
OPICA: AN INNOVATIVE PROGRAM FOR THOSE WITH MEMORY LOSS
Even when she could no longer get up and dance, or paint, Mary’s mother could still clap her hands. She loved the staff coming up and being kind. She even had a boyfriend in OPICA at one point.
What goes on in the soul of a person with dementia?
PHOTOGRAPHER JOSEF SUDEK, THE POET OF PRAGUE
“Luminous,” “mysterious,” “haunting,” “ethereal,” “otherworldly,” “timeless,” and “romantic” are a few of the words regularly applied to his work.
THE SAINT WITH THE ASH BLOND WIG
The day of my appointment, I found a seat and looked around at the ten or so others, perched stiffly on the edges of their chairs. “They know what it’s like to lie staring at the ceiling all night;” I thought; “they could die, too.”
ST. KATERI HABITATS AND PARKS
Saint Kateri Habitats and Parks is a ministry that “inspires Catholics and all people of good will to restore and manage homes, yards, gardens, parishes, schools, farms, parks, forests, rivers, and wetlands as healthy habitats for people and wildlife.”
MY VERSION OF THE PULITZER
Since 1900, the Xavier Society for the Blind in New York City has been providing free braille and audio books to blind and visually impaired people worldwide in order for them to learn about, develop, and practice their Catholic faith.
CRUCIFY HIM!
Interestingly, the scapegoat had to be internally robust and strong, in order to be worthy to bear, or capable of bearing, the collective shadow. So often it’s the family “empath”—the most sensitive, giving and spiritually evolved; the most “different” in some way—who is scapegoated.