Kevin Duffy 8/9/22 Kevin Duffy 8/9/22

Europe in These Times - Alone In the Gray City

I am walking by myself through downtown Stuttgart, the clouds of the city’s seemingly ever-gray sky blunting the last of the day’s sunlight. It’s just past seven and the Saturday night Mass at the St. Maria Kirche has concluded.

David J. M. Herr SJ 8/4/22 David J. M. Herr SJ 8/4/22

Music Lessons

I like arriving far too early for concerts to wait alone outside the locked doors of the symphony hall and hear the orchestra practice snippets of the concert to come. Sometimes it’s muffled but still powerful, like a thunder storm or erupting volcano in the distance, sometimes soft and delicate to force me forget all else and listen intently. I grow excited for what is to come, but the present moment itself is also precious. What I hear, though incomplete, is beautiful music. Life is being locked outside the hall.

Dwight Lindley 8/2/22 Dwight Lindley 8/2/22

The One Word We Hear in Pet Sounds

Is there a place in this world for a man like Brian Wilson?

Kevin Duffy 7/26/22 Kevin Duffy 7/26/22

Europe in These Times: House of Terror

A visitor to Hungary today will find, at both Gellért Hill and the street outside of the House of Terror, scenes that belie the difficulties faced there during both the Nazi and Soviet occupations.

Steven Knepper 7/19/22 Steven Knepper 7/19/22

Hit me with wine / With water

The Poetry of Caitlin Smith Gilson

Oso Guardiola 7/12/22 Oso Guardiola 7/12/22

Creative Writing as a Liberal Art

Including literature in a Catholic liberal arts curriculum is useless if students are not taught to think liberally, to think lovingly, about literature. This might be done simply by working literary criticism into the curriculum, but any science teacher knows that students learn better with a lab. The workshop is the lab of criticism.

Adriana Watkins 7/5/22 Adriana Watkins 7/5/22

On Reaching the June Moon

Watching a strawberry supermoon rise over Revere beach with Adriana Watkins

Oso Guardiola 6/28/22 Oso Guardiola 6/28/22

Craft as a Liberal Art

Oso Guardiola on the value of craft - “Without studying craft, assumptions about interpretation are made, and conclusions are drawn based on these assumptions. Reading, enjoying, feeling catharsis without craft is fine. Analyzing without craft is dangerous.”

Denise Trull 6/21/22 Denise Trull 6/21/22

Finding Bethlehem

Denise Trull muses on grandfathers and home while contemplating the classic book, “A Woman Wrapped in Silence.”

Jeffrey Essmann 6/16/22 Jeffrey Essmann 6/16/22

Carving

Jeffrey Essman considers the way in which poems are carved from silence.

Mary Virginia Vietor 6/14/22 Mary Virginia Vietor 6/14/22

The Memory of Heaven

St. Augustine and Thoreau On Spiritual Awakening

Allison Cundiff 6/7/22 Allison Cundiff 6/7/22

Forty

Allison Cundiff thanks God for breaking apart her expectations for what a family should look like and what it means to welcome a little one into the world.