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.
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‘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.
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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.”
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Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love. Painting below, featured in the exhibition, is Giovanni Lanfranco’s Mary Magdalen raised by Angels, ca. 1616/17
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“Things Artificial Intelligence Can’t Do” by Aaron Belz
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads: When we look at ourselves, we are seeking something. We want to be known, seen and understood. But we are looking in the wrong place. The mirror shows us our own self-critical and self-exalting gaze — the gaze of pride, pleasure and ego. This fantasy is powerful, even mesmerizing, but unreliable. When we look solely at ourselves, we fail to encounter anything that resists us; there are no contradictions, no interruptions. We need the honest gaze: the gaze of others and the gaze toward others. To see ourselves clearly, we don’t use mirrors. We use relationships.
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Finished reading: This Is the Door by Darcey Steinke 📚
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Million Kisses Club: How can we keep anyone safe in a precarious and increasingly insane world? Like most people, my family and I got kicked around a bit. Illness knocked. Parents died. Work stalled. Friends suffered. The planet seemed to spin haphazardly, throwing all of us into tumult.
Then my grandson was born.
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Mom Aesthetic: In a world where some babies have Instagram handles before they’re even born, deciding how you want to portray yourself as a parent online has become, for some, almost as important as parenting itself.
