We started our eight-hour drive as a little expedition, adventuring on the I-70 from Baltimore to the “far West”. With little traffic, listening to good music and with a quiet sense of expectation, we crossed Maryland, reaching the Cumberland and the Appa...
“For the very fact that we live five minutes we affirm the existence of a ‘something”’ which deep down makes living those five minutes worthwhile.” (Chapter 5, The Religious Sense) Recently, some of my friends gathered at a nursing home to sing Irish s...
What can I say? Our friend fresh from radiation and chemotherapy carried the cross to start the procession in the chapel at Franciscan Univeristy. To watch her small body carry the cross was almost to watch metaphor take flesh, or to watch flesh become me...
“Reciting the rosary is a kind of heavenly manual work; an invisible sewing or knitting or embroidering, done quickly through the fifty Hail Marys on a crown of little pearls.” Bernadette Soubirous is in the presence of Mary. There has sprung up in her “a...
Click here to listen to the Pergolesi "Stabat Mater." Stabat Mater dolorosa: Pergolesi’s hymn helps us to perceive mysterious joy, paradoxical consolation, and vigorous certainty that challenges life’s happening. It helps us always. Truly, he is like ...
It was Tuesday and day five of tension at home. The kids were fighting again, this time over a missing hairbrush – or was it who ate the last of the cereal? My husband and I were needling at each other over who filled the dishwasher wrong. I prayed, ask...
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of three novels—Social Creature (2019), The World Cannot Give (2023), and her most recent work, Here in Avalon (2024). She holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford University, and her nonfiction works of cultural commen...
One thing is certain: in the movement of CL we sing. At the Spiritual Exercises, during the liturgy, before a meeting. But also on a hike or an evening among friends. It is maybe one of the most characteristic expressions of the movement. “It is a sensibi...
In Los Angeles, where the pace of life is fast — where there’s barely a moment to genuinely answer a person’s inquiry “How are you?” and a latent skepticism that it could ever be a genuine question — a little flock of people are meeting near LAX (Los Ange...
Greene’s novel is narrated by Maurice Bendrix, a novelist by profession who has been praised, he tells us, for his “technical abilities.” Bendrix is a writer of “realist” fiction; that is, he writes fiction that tries to stay close in its descriptions, ch...
In his letter addressed to the Movement in which he announced that he would be stepping down as President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Fr. Julian Carron wrote, “I wish you to live this circumstance as an occasion of growth of your eccles...
The Leonard Cohen exhibit that we prepared for the Encounter bore many unexpected fruits. A few days after the Encounter, our team had a conversation that made this clear. Here is a recounting of our conversation: My wife and I, who both worked on this...
Slant Books recently published Living the Liturgy: A Witness by Fr. Giussani. The insights in Living the Liturgy were taken from conversations that Fr. Giussani had with members of Communion and Liberation, and this is the first time this text is availabl...
Last semester, I met with Rob Phillips – a biophysics professor from Caltech – and he told me: “When I bring my students on our field trip the Galapagos Islands, I ask them to sit for twenty minutes twice a day, every day, in silence, to look at the ocean...