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February 2013

February 07, 2013

Becoming Both Daughter and Mother

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong we are until we...

February 05, 2013

The Value of What I Teach

“Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.” —“Box of Rain,” Robert Hunter, lyrics;...

February 04, 2013

Amateur Mentors

For Katherine Diop Plod on, you Angels say, do better aspire higher And one day...

February 01, 2013

What is Truth?

"It's a slippery slope when a companies don't deliver what they promise." Yes, "a companies."...

January 2013

January 30, 2013

Learning to See Beauty

When I taught Spanish in public school I projected Hispanic and Latino artwork on my...

January 29, 2013

Beauty Is as Beauty Does

The current issue of Image (#75) is full of rich mini-essays on some of the...

January 28, 2013

Remembering the Sabbath

I was recently in an e-mail exchange with someone regarding my refusal to force my...

January 24, 2013

Road Rage and Repentance

Driving other day, down a busy city street, one which I drive once, twice, sometimes...

January 21, 2013

Writing in the Age of Unbelief

Years ago I was at a panel discussion featuring several Catholic authors when someone asked...

January 21, 2013

Secession, or Why This New Yorker Won’t Be Joining the Enlightened States of America

Shortly after the November presidential election, I was sent an e-mail on the assumption that...

January 19, 2013

A Reading with Kelly Foster

If you’re a Good Letters reader in the Seattle era, blogger emerita Kelly Foster, now...

January 18, 2013

The Boy Who Believed in Airplanes

This is Jeffrey Overstreet’s last post as a regular contributor to Good Letters. We thank...

January 17, 2013

The Peril of False Spring

It’s January, but the weatherman says the temperatures will creep up near seventy for the...

January 16, 2013

A Requiem for Rejects

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering....

January 15, 2013

Silence Wounds, Silence Heals

It was there all along. Troubling me. It hurt me and aroused my sympathy for...

January 11, 2013

Whispers of Faith in a Postmodern World

The Wall Street Journal featured this article by Image founder and editor Gregory Wolfe on Friday,...

January 11, 2013

Weakness is Truth

A couple of weeks ago in the gym locker room I averted my eyes as...

January 10, 2013

Clinging to Christmas

I cling to Christmas. I’d like to say that I have some tradition to which...

January 09, 2013

Soul Friends

“One’s ‘spiritual life’ isn’t apart from the rest of one’s life, something that goes on...

January 06, 2013

The Anniversary of My Father’s Death

“After the first exile, there is no other.” —Rosellen Brown, The Autobiography of My Mother,...

January 01, 2013

Twelve Days To Sit with the God-Made-Man

As a child, I was somewhat confused by the partridge in the pear tree and...

December 2012

December 27, 2012

The State of Things to Come

With relation to time, Walker Percy once compared the present to the tape head on...

December 27, 2012

Come Before Winter Part Two

Continued from yesterday. Paul faced the winter of death, and Timothy faces the winter of...

December 25, 2012

Come Before Winter Part One

Every year when I was young, as the vibrant colors of West Virginia’s fall foliage...

December 24, 2012

St. Linus the Evangelist

An Encore Post ABC recently ran its annual showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, one...

December 20, 2012

Jerusalem Risen and in Ruins

Israel surprised me. It met me in Boston where I had traveled to attend a...

December 20, 2012

Thomas Merton: Contemplative Outlaw

On December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton stepped out of the shower in his Bangkok hotel...

December 18, 2012

The Poetry of Married Love

When my husband was told he’d have quadruple bypass surgery the next day, we were—believe...

December 17, 2012

God Help Me

Center-frayed I begin to ponder—in the way one probes an aching tooth with the tongue—whether...

December 16, 2012

The Christmas I Sat Next to a Sex Offender

Last year my husband and I celebrated our first Christmas with our infant daughter. She...