Tag: community

Ironically, by searching for the self, we also lose ourselves. The more intently we look within, the more elusive our sense of self becomes.

Clay County, MO. At first blush, independent interdependence may seem an oxymoron. Yet people exercise a kind of balance between their need for autonomy and...

I recently visited a barber in my Virginian hometown whom I had not patronized in more than a year (I’d taken to getting my...

The failure to distinguish between art and beauty has caused much confusion. Art and beauty have two different but overlapping trajectories–one towards union and the other towards transcendent reality.

I am in love with my neighborhood because I am in love with the people, how resilient and complicated they are, and how they teach me how wrong I have been about the world. They have proven to me what Jesus said in his most famous sermon, the one on the mount: “blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

In Canto XXX of the Inferno, Dante becomes fascinated with an argument between Sinon the Greek and Master Adamo, both of them condemned for...

It is a cloudless July day in Connecticut—the kind of day that keeps people rooted in this place despite its long winters and high...

It is hard to see a silver lining in the abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the scarring crisis has given Pope Francis...

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about...

From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.”  Fifty-five years later, our networks...