Stories about everything from motherhood, faith, and grief, to classical-Christian education, current events, and the writing life.
We still treat suicide as a stain on someone's character rather than the public-health crisis it is. Four years after losing my brother, I've learned that talking is our strongest weapon against stigma.
Read moreParenthood is paradox from the beginning — miraculous and grueling. When postpartum illness strikes, story and shared suffering become our most powerful antidotes.
Read moreAfter I told my kids to hitch their wagons to a star, my 5-year-old grabbed a grown-up book on mindful writing and my 8-year-old reached for a tome on Ancient Rome. Maybe Emerson is sinking in.
Read moreExplaining death to my children after losing two friends reminded me that the unnatural severing of the human heart is our most accurate sensation — a sign we are not quite at home here.
Read moreA letter to my brother on the third anniversary of his death — because depression may have won by human standards, but not by God's.
Read moreWatching friends send their children to college stirs a grief I didn't expect — mourning not just my mother, but the tears she never got to cry for me.
Read moreEverything about Strasbourg's gothic cathedral draws the eye up — its light, its ancient expressions, its reminder that God is the source of all creativity.
Read moreStormy Antibes and sun-drenched Nice each offer their own shade of Mediterranean beauty — one cast in constant motion, the other in an edge-of-the-world calm.
Read moreA dream on a hill in Normandy, Mont Saint-Michel has drawn pilgrims and monks for over a thousand years. The moment you step onto its tide-washed land, you feel the divine appointment of it all.
Read moreAll of Paris is art — from the symmetrical bliss of its streets to the scent of perfume, Vespa fumes, and crepes. If you have air in your lungs, this city will inspire you.
Read moreFrance has such a distinct sense of place that when I leave, I miss it — its reverence for food, its tradition over profit, and the bedrock principles that no act of terror can snuff out.
Read moreI scheduled my preventative double mastectomy in September to give that dreaded month a chance to redeem herself. She didn't disappoint.
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