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Articles
How I Learned to Love Confession
When I converted to Catholicism in 2023 after eighteen months of RCIA, I was almost totally ignorant of the mortal sins I would need to confess before taking communion. My RCIA priest had said that we were required to confess once a year, or any time we’d committed a serious sin...
Goodbye, Saffron
In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman wrote that the “people of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral and physical circumstances so different from our own...
In Search of Turkish Delight
In a final scene of Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel Strong Poison, a murderer devours a large quantity of Turkish delight in the parlor of Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur-sleuth...
Stay in My Heart
On a spring day seven years ago I was driving across Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn feeling unusually right with the world. I felt peaceful and uplifted because I...
The Road to Stella Maris
When Cormac McCarthy died in June at age eighty-nine, the news touched off grief and adulation such as contemporary literary authors rarely inspire. Musicians, scientists, conservatives, Catholics, all have...
