The Burial
There’s nothing quite like watching what used to be your brother being lowered into a hole in the Illinois earth to remind you that every moment is a universe far beyond our ability to articulate. But...
View ArticleUntil Daybreak
In the days leading up to last year’s Hurricane Irene, media coverage was relentless and shrill: Irene, we were told, had the potential to be the storm of the century; it could flood Manhattan and...
View ArticleLicense to Fret
For several nights in July, the thrilling, testosterone-laden notes of the James Bond theme music filled our family room, as my husband and I and whichever of our boys (twelve, sixteen, and eighteen)...
View ArticleBaby Steps
My fifteen-month-old son’s favorite game is “run into Mommy’s room and grab things out of her nightstand before she catches me.” As soon as I set him on his feet at the top of the stairs, he bolts down...
View ArticleLanced
Ah, 1999—those were the days. It was summertime and we were in Holland for our annual visit with my wife’s family. Normally I didn’t spend a lot of time with the Dutch paper, but on this day a story...
View ArticleValiant Efforts
That winter the Plymouth Valiant supplanted the boat-like wagon we’d always used for the ride to Mass. The reasons were unclear. Maybe it got better mileage. Maybe my parents were reliving their...
View ArticleBehind Enemy Lines
“Stay away from Catholic boys,” my father told me. I was about thirteen, sitting in the kitchen while he was making pancakes. We were Presbyterian, but the words struck me as some sort of family code....
View ArticleNull & Void?
When I married my third wife, after two divorces, we eloped, and the ceremony was performed by a Protestant minister. My wife is a woman of faith, an Irish Catholic who, despite misgivings about...
View ArticleRibbon Chasers
Since his confession to Oprah Winfrey last month, Lance Armstrong’s psyche has been lanced and explored from many different angles. Some have deemed the man who collected millions for cancer research a...
View ArticleHigh-Concept Verdi
All too often, ambitious opera directors move operas from one time and place to another in an attempt to “improve” them via this or that bold new concept. In 1976 Patrice Chéreau’s notorious Bayreuth...
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A Higher Power
While I lived in South Africa, I got to know a remarkable Quaker, John Broom. He taught me the real basis of sainthood: understanding and honoring the difference between the human self and God.
View ArticleBending the Lens
For years I’ve been introducing students in my college-level fine- arts courses to the photographs of Diane Arbus (1923–71). Old friends of mine by now, the images created by this “photographer of...
View ArticleService Entrance
Long after his political career had ended, the unsuccessful presidential candidate George Romney, father of the unsuccessful Republican candidate Mitt, became an advocate for national service. He often...
View ArticleThe Last Word: Take & Eat
The supermarket, that cornucopia of modern life, has no greater gift to the shopper than the apple. Tiered bins of Granny Smiths, McIntoshes, Fujis, Braeburns, and Delicious, among others, coyly wink...
View ArticleLast Word | Out of Sight
Luxuria is one of those hard words for beginning Latin students to get their heads around. It does and doesn’t mean what we mean by “luxury.” Maybe the best explanation is that in the modern world we...
View ArticleLast Word: One Pound, Fourteen Ounces
My wife and daughters and I were headed out to Saturday Vigil Mass on a dreary November evening some thirty years ago. The phone rang, and my wife and I exchanged worried glances as she picked up the...
View ArticleLast Word: Spontaneous Tolerance
On a late December afternoon in central Kathmandu, children fresh from the confinement of classrooms play in a courtyard, called a chowk in Nepalese. The girls have strung rubber bands together to play...
View ArticleLast Word: The Paradise Part
“Sit in your cell as in paradise,” begins St. Romuald’s Brief Rule, an eleventh-century text that guides the life of monks in the Camaldolese order. When you’re two miles up a winding road above the...
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