“A shaded bench marked the end of the trail. I sat there for a while, feeling my heart beat. I thought about how the adrenaline of constant texts and links and tweets and bad news, bad news, bad news, is both toxic and addictive…Does anyone even read anymore?”
OUR COMMON HOME
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.”
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.
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”….
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.
A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT
“But I through the greatness of your love have access to your house. I bow down before your holy temple, filled with awe.” Psalm 5:7. “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” John 14: 23. Last Friday […]
SPREADING THE GOSPEL FROM MY DESK!
Christ told us to spread the Gospels to the end of the earth. How lockdown has actually helped!
DISCUSSING MY BOOK RAVISHED
Michael John Cusick, self-described wounded healer and an all-around standup human being, operates a ministry out of Colorado and has a wonderful podcast called Restoring the Soul. Recently he had me on to discuss my newest book, RAVISHED: Notes on Womanhood. You can listen to the podcast HERE.
GET UP! PRESS ON!
One of my all-time favorite Gospel passages is the healing of the paralytic by the pool in Bethaisda.
MARY GANDSEY, RESTORER OF WOOD
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Native Angelena Mary Gandsey was born in Long Beach and moved to Altadena in 1984. She earned a BA in Psychology from UCLA in 1968, did a few odd jobs, had a child, and needed to go back to work shortly afterward. “As a kid, I […]
POUSTINIA
A poustinia is a small sparsely furnished cabin or room where one goes to pray and fast alone in the presence of God. The word poustinia has its origin in the Russian word for desert. One called to live permanently in a poustinia is called a poustinik. I first became familiar with the concept through […]
A JOURNEY ROUND MY BATHROOM
From The Public Domain Review: “In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. An impetuous young soldier, he was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel; there is no record of […]
THE RESURRECTION: MY URBAN GARDEN
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Cicero, 1st century B.C. Isak Dinesen had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. I have a native plant garden in Pasadena. Unlike Dinesen (“Out of Africa”), however, I don’t “own” my garden. It’s behind the Craftsman where I […]
LOCKED DOWN IN ASSISI
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Lori King, Professor of Theology, is a U.S. citizen living in Assisi, Italy. She’s been confined to her home home since Sunday, March 8, at 9 pm. We connected recently via phone. “Even before the lockdown, Mass had been suspended. I’d gone to 6 pm Mass […]