It was nonviolence that initially brought me to my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon. I was a new Christian, baptized into the Catholic Church at Easter in 1983. The very next month, the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference issued a pastoral letter called The Challenge of Peace. The context of the letter was the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. What struck me most powerfully was Section 4, “The Value of Non-violence.” The section is an overview of nonviolence in Christian history.... Read more
Narrative poetry has its special challenge: how does it differentiate itself from prose? David Mason’s story of his family’s relation to a dying fawn does this in several ways. First there’s the iambic pentameter beat carrying us along. Then wordplay, beginning with the opening line: “The vigil and the vigilance of love.” There’s the internal rhyming of cracked… black… back in the description of the dying fawn on the kids’ garage floor: “And there, quick-breathing on the cracked concrete, /... Read more
This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on July 21, 2014. I didn’t spend enough time with Oscar this summer. For forty years I’ve believed time will never run out. Visiting California, I took my annual walk through my childhood backyard of bougainvillea, crepe myrtle, and fruit. I picked some strawberries, paid homage to my name scratched in a concrete border in 1980, then wandered to the side yard to find Oscar. I sat in the gravel as he gummed... Read more
For modern man, a loss of the religious center resulted in all kinds of maladies. Read more
The following two-part post was originally delivered as the 2017 commencement address for Trinity Academy in Portland, Oregon. Read yesterday’s installment here. As you graduates well know, one of the most popular genres in books these days is the dystopia. Dystopia can be a powerful and revelatory form of writing, one that prophetically criticizes harmful trends that exist today. But most of our current dystopias feel self-indulgent and self-pitying. It would seem that living in the past is America’s most popular... Read more
The following two-part post was originally delivered as the 2017 commencement address for Trinity Academy in Portland, Oregon. Thank you for the high honor of inviting me to speak on this special occasion. My heartfelt congratulations to you graduating seniors for having reached this important milestone in your lives. Given the deep and demanding curriculum you’ve just completed, that is quite an achievement and I hope you feel justifiable pride in having reached this point. I know that your parents,... Read more
I find myself reading this poem both literally and as a metaphor for our lives. On the literal level, Moira Linehan focuses with intensely loving detail on the Japanese brush painter. The first four lines list with tender concern all the things that might go wrong in the painting process. The next five lines move into the painter’s being: his years of training, his now “leaning back on his heels” picturing a heron that will soon return to his pond.... Read more
This month I thought it would be a good idea to take four hours of Arabic every week and an intensive JavaScript course all while working full-time. I was nervous about the Arabic, scared that I wouldn’t remember how to read or speak politely after three years away from formal lessons, but strangely, it came right back. Maybe it was the pressure—a nervous stomach that forces letters into words and meanings. I left the first class feeling happy, my brain... Read more
By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Continued from yesterday. This post originally appeared as a web-exclusive feature accompanying Image issue 84. Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. I asked Winner about her new book, her love of history, her punctuation, and the politics of writing about the Bible. Mary Kenagy Mitchell for Image: Could you talk about what... Read more
By Mary Kenagy Mitchell This post originally appeared as a web-exclusive feature accompanying Image issue 84. Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. The chapter excerpted in issue 84 is about bread. I asked Winner about her new book, her love of history, her punctuation, and the politics of writing about the Bible. Mary Kenagy Mitchell for Image: Your... Read more
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