From 1997: While I am eager to live, I am also eager to take the journey when God calls me.
Faith in Focus
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The mothers of the Columbine massacre
From 2000: Perhaps the N.R.A. has met its match. All the money in the world cannot contend with the rage of a mother torn from her child.
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During Lent, we need both penance and beauty
I suppose there is a line of thought in Christianity that would equate the cheap and mean with holiness, but somehow Catholicism has always found room for both Michelangelo and Mother Teresa.
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What snowfall in Rome taught me about Lent
The freshness and wonder, the way that what was there before still exists but is now shot through with newness. The city glitters. Why not? Lent is the season of baptismal preparation as much as penance.
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Do we ever retire from being mothers?
Since retiring from my job, my husband has found me irritating. We had a talk (after fighting), and he is right: I am mothering him. Smothering him. “I have a mother,” he said. “I want a wife, a partner, a best friend.”
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I learned on Holy Thursday that in times of trouble, women know the way out
That woman is in so many parishes, right there beneath the exit sign and almost out the door, singing while the roof gets ripped off and the sky falls.
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Why I had to climb Rome’s Holy Stairs (on my knees) to believe them
Before long I had tears in my eyes—and not from the uneven grooves worn into the wood by pilgrims’ knees. Something about the physical discomfort helped me to focus on the much greater pain Jesus had felt on those same stairs.
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After California, the real reason we should end the death penalty—for good.
The most compelling reason not to execute the convicted is an existential one: We humans are not God.
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What’s wrong with celebrating sin in public?
In the culture of the shout, the intimate heat of the crucible of suffering is replaced by the heat of the Klieg lights, which reveal without transforming.
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What Lenten pilgrims can learn from the martyrs of Rome
The second of Rome’s station churches is dedicated to a soldier-saint, George of Lydda. Soldier-martyrs seem to have left a particular mark on the memory of Roman Christians.