During my commute to and from work on the bus the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to snippets of “Faith, Hope & Carnage,” an audiobook of rich conversations between Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, and Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan. They talk about the meaty heartaches and joys of what it means to be alive,…
On the cusp of turning 80 years old in 2020, David Hockney, the British pop artist known for his vivid California landscapes, decided to go to Normandy to paint the arrival of spring on his iPad. Taking his iPad outside in ‘plein air’ (a French expression referring to the act of painting outdoors), he painted…
After my father died in 2020, I began to have dreams about him returning from the dead. Sometimes we found a way to revive him. Sometimes it turned out he hadn’t been dead at all. I once dreamed we had buried him by mistake, and I had to dig him up again. My brother and…
“This idea of finding grace within the mess, I think that is the call of the Christian life.” -Laura Kelly Fanucci Season 4, Episode 2 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, hosted by Sister Julia Walsh. LISTEN HERE: IN THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Messy Jesus Business, Sister Julia Walsh talks with author and speaker…
Sister Julia Walsh and author Christiana N. Peterson contemplate death, our cultural fear and avoidance of it, and what it looks like to be in a healthy relationship with death. They also discuss grief, mysticism and the saints, the importance of death rituals, and whether rituals are for the dead or those in mourning
I heard the voice of God last night. It came not from my church a few blocks up the road, the historic St. Augustine where Holy Thursday’s Mass of the Last Supper was taking place, but from around the corner. It came from a man sitting on a bench in Tuba Fats Square in the…
It’s 3 a.m. and the moon is glowing softly through the wide bedroom window. Why am I awake? I look to the side and see that our six-month-old is sleeping soundly. A repetition of the sound that woke me, “Mama!!”, comes from the room across the hall. It’s our three-year-old who, despite a strong, independent…
In the book “A Wrinkle in Time,” Mrs. Whatsit sighs and tells the children, “Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words.” Last weekend, the global community of Christian writers quaked in shock as we absorbed the news that the influential author Rachel Held Evans, 37,…
What does it mean to be a community of care? How can we deepen in our care for one another in a world so caught up in efficiency and the self-protection of individualism?
In 2002, during the months in which the The Boston Globe released the findings of its investigation into wrong doing on behalf of the Catholic clergy in the Diocese of Boston, I was a high school junior preparing for confirmation. The investigation exposed a widespread pattern of sexual abuse from several Catholic priests, five of…
You must be logged in to post a comment.