I am a member of a church that practices sacramental Confession. I wasn’t always. My family were Southern Baptists, and I was baptized, as a teenager, into the Reformed tradition, so I know all the theological objections to the idea of confessing one’s sins in the...
It is six o’clock in the morning. I am on an overnight business trip to New York, alone in my hotel room. Weak streams of dawn light leak around the edges of the blackout shades on the window of my room in the Club Quarters...
I was at work last Thursday when I received the call from the school that every parent dreads: My eight-year-old daughter had been discovered with nits in her hair, on suspicion of lice. Actually, she was not alone. A bunch of children in the class had...
For me, this has been the Summer of Sufficiency. Like most moms—and probably like you, too—I am always on the lookout for better and more thoughtful ways of doing things: running my household, teaching my children, opportunities I want then to have and experiences for...
Here’s a little story that doesn’t speak to well about my parenting: around the time my daughter was three and my son was eight, one my daughter got up and asked for orange juice to be served in a champagne flute, right about the time...
I’ve been through a lot of heartbreak in my life. In addition to the real, lasting losses in my life—the death of my father and my mother’s mental illness—there are scores of disappointments. Awards not won, books not published, stories rejected, and opportunities on which...
There’s a private elementary school in Washington, D.C., that advertises itself with this adage from Plato’s Republic, “The beginning is the most important part of any work.” As 2017 launches, I am thinking a lot about the concept of “process” as it relates to my...
In my Eastern Orthodox church, it is a traditional practice to fast during Advent. I can’t think of anything better to underscore for my children the idea of anticipation, and waiting for the birth of Christ. But by December 23, we are all getting kind of...
Twenty years ago, when I was still twenty-something and single, I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church at St. George Cathedral in Wichita, Kansas. I had been in that small windswept city on a graduate fellowship, and had spent some ten months living in a...