Sister June Carpenter, the Oldest Shaker, Has Died: One day, on a trip to Boston, she recalled having a spiritual awakening as she observed the crowds. “I could see that God was within each of them,” she told Ms. Lauber. “I’ve always remembered that — that God must be inside everyone in some way, whether they realize it or not.”

The feeling faded, she said, but the insight did not: “You can’t stay on the mountaintop forever. Like the Shakers say, ‘You have to come down into the valley,’ that’s where most of life is.”

Maira Kalman. Bread and butter was all she served. 2004.

Sit Here: By the end of this baseball season, Ms. Strub had attended games with about 30 strangers and found that the people she connected with needed her as much as she needed them. She built an online community, bringing together the people she had met in a private Facebook group, calling the project “Strangers to Friends.”

If she couldn’t attend a game — she had to miss a few when her husband, Mike, had brain surgery — she handed off her tickets to strangers who had reached out to her but didn’t know each other.

She said she was “gobsmacked” by the reaction to her post.

“I have made so many friends this summer,” she said. “I have friends that will be my friends for the rest of my life.”

The Grace We Seek but Have Forgotten:And this leads us to reconciliation, whose Greek word in the New Testament means exchange. Exchanging the need to be right for the desire to understand; exchanging what’s broken for repair.

The Descent from the Cross

Ignacio Gatica: Sunsets, 2024

‘I Shall Be Very Surprised if There Isn’t a Next Chapter’: A Q&A With Sarah Coakley: How do I pray? Well, you hand yourself over to the source of your being, and then you ask some things. But the handing over is primary, and learning how to do that. It changes your perspective on God — because when you practice this, even for a very short time each day, simple opening up space in which God is God. You don’t control it. That’s what’s so frightening.

They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years: That afternoon in Mordí, Kastaña asked if he could tell me a Guna myth. Thousands of years ago, he said, seven brothers and a sister were born in a river. A pair of women, each part frog, approached them and announced, “We are your mothers.” The siblings believed them and allowed them to be raised by them, until one day they came to a clear, tranquil river and saw their reflections for the first time.

“They had been deceived,” Kastaña said. “In fact, the frog women were their enemies.”

Two poems: “Refrigeratior, 1957” by Thomas Lux and “How It Will End” by Denise Duhamel

Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love. Painting below, featured in the exhibition, is Giovanni Lanfranco’s Mary Magdalen raised by Angels, ca. 1616/17

The Three Watchmen

Ha Chong-Hyun Conjunction 25-07, 2025 Oil on hemp cloth

“Not Allowed to Care” by Aaron Belz

“Things Artificial Intelligence Can’t Do” by Aaron Belz

I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common: From an early age, we suffer from what cognitive psychologists call the illusion of self-sufficiency, overlooking how much we owe our skills to other people. In one experiment, two groups of children were given a machine they’d never seen before. In the first, none managed to figure out how it worked on their own. In the second, the vast majority succeeded after seeing someone else use the machine and getting hints along the way. Still, after the experiment, 70 percent of the second group claimed they would have learned to use the machine without help.

I Walked 500 Miles on the Camino de Santiago to Find What Comes Next: Somewhere between the Pyrenees and Santiago, I learned that when life steals your momentum, maybe the answer is to just keep walking.

I Spent My Summer in the Cemetery: By the end of the trip, I had begun to notice little cemeteries everywhere, humble lots beside rural highways, scenic benches dedicated to people long past, impromptu memorials at the bases of telephone poles. Everywhere there were lives that had been lived and commemorated. I understood this as a way of encountering the world: to remain attuned to the ghosts native to that place.

The Nuns Who Took Over an Assisted Living Center: In the mid-1960s, America was home to more than 180,000 Roman Catholic nuns; now there are only about 35,000, with an average age of over 80. Congregations have had to sell or close their convents, forcing these older sisters to find new places to live.

Speaking for the Dead: “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”

From “Last on Earth” by Mary Ruefle

I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast: But I will wait a little longer for a cure—even if it means losing my fertility and living under the shadow of risk—if it lets us approach this new world more carefully, and ensure that, in curing cancer, we do not lose the things that make cancer worth curing.

Lynette Cook – Lightness of Being

Liza Mancini – A Summer Night

Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life: We should be thankful for the progress we’ve made on mental health and continue to improve access to effective treatment. But we should also try to spend less time stuck in our heads and more time out in the world, pursuing the kinds of activities that support mental health without making us so obsessed with it.