I was struck recently by a similarity between three articles on three different topics: the experiences of people who accidentally kill someone, problems with the disease model of addiction, a soldier who tried to contact the family of a civilian he killed in Iraq. Each of the articles is worth reading in full, but I've… Read More
Lewis Hyde on Usury
I love Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, so I recently checked to see if he wrote other books, and, thus, read his The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. One chapter is focused on usury. Hyde explains that the first Christian pawnshops were allowed on the condition that charging interest was… Read More
Losing My Child at Easter
My husband and I lost our first child at 6 weeks at Easter in 2017. I wrote this essay to thank the women who cared for me in extraordinary ways while we grieved. "One week after we lost our baby, the Gospel reading was the story of the apostle Thomas poking his finger into the… Read More
Daniel Tammet on wordplay, poetry, and language-learning
When I read Thinking in Numbers, the first book I encountered by Daniel Tammet, I ordered a copy for myself before I was halfway done with the library copy. I loved the way he wrote about math. And, in his new book, Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, I love the way he writes… Read More
Farewell to the small graces of Great Comet
"Natasha and Pierre’s marriage is hundreds of pages away (and Andrey will reconcile with Natasha and die before that comes to pass). The change in Natasha is simply this, as she describes it, “For the first time in many days, I weep tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of thanks.” Nothing has been solved… Read More
Don’t Dox the Alt-Right
"For many of the rally attendees, Charlottesville may be the first time they gathered with the people they’d spoken to online, their first chance to see the movement they’d joined in the flesh. For some of them, that first encounter, and the violence that they were a part of, may have left them with a… Read More
Rowan Williams on responses to Rodin
I read Rowan Williams's The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language as part of my 2017 reading list. I meant it to be spiritual reading, but the book was a bit abstruse and technical for me overall. This passage, however, I loved: Many years ago, I heard a distinguished sculptor saying that he had discovered… Read More
What I learned in Julius Caesar
"I have spent this week rehearsing for an amateur, seat-of-our-pants production of “Julius Caesar” (planned before the Shakespeare in the Park controversy). Our cast of eight is putting together the show over five nights of three-hour rehearsals squeezed in after work each day. [...] It is not the ideal way to prepare a professional production (though… Read More
Talking Conversion Bookshelves on Sacred Treasures
I joined Kathie Duggan on her "Sacred Treasures" program on Radio Maria on June 5th to talk about my conversion and my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer. We discussed why Mass reminds me of parametric equations, and she asked what books played the biggest role in my conversion. (If you… Read More
Speaking on “Wizardry and the Wounds in the World” at Doxacon
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be giving the keynote speech at this year’s Doxacon (a Christian convention on fantasy and science fiction)! Tickets are on sale now (with a special rate for students, priests, and consecrated religious). My husband will also be speaking at this year's Doxacon, and here’s what we’re both speaking on: … Read More