Stephanie Paulsell

Learning a language requires us to focus our attention on something outside ourselves. It's a lot like learning to pray.

My Italian is rusty. When I go to church in Rome and try to follow along, I'm reminded of Woolf's "incessant shower of innumerable atoms."

A student I taught with recalls licking honey from Hebrew letters as a child. My own memories of religious education are less auspicious.

Anthony C. Yu died this spring. I am still discovering the profound influence this teacher had on me.

In To the Lighthouse, two people who don't get along find themselves looking at a bowl of fruit. "Looking together," writes Woolf, "united them."

Azra Akšamija and Jo Murphy make art that points to things made invisible by fear—both our own fear and our society's.

On Ash Wednesday, as we remember our sins and ask to be forgiven, let's also remember what we love and ask to love it more.

In the 12th century, a Benedictine nun had a vision of Jesus’ humanity. It couldn’t have happened on a better night.

To give

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I can see my dad's manuscript: the title centered in caps, the body double-spaced and marked up by hand. But I can't remember the words.

What does it mean to "turn to faith"? To gather in the like-minded and bar the door? Or to take a riskier move outward?

As a Lilly Fellow, I was compelled by Mark Schwehn's vision of all academic work as the work of teaching, with love at the core of its mission.

My student hasn’t allegorized Jane Eyre as Origen did the Bible. But she wrestles with passages until the text gives her a blessing.

Virginia Woolf’s novel details the ordinary illuminations our lives offer, “matches struck in the dark.”

This Lent, add a journey story to your reading. Follow Gilgamesh to the ends of the earth or the Knights of the Round Table into the forest.

Literary belief is always metaphorical, not actual. What about religious belief?

Captain Phillips emphasizes the larger story: long before they meet, the lives of the pirates and the captain are already bound together.

When a man with an AK-47 entered her school, Antoinette Tuff prayed—and convinced the man to lay his weapon down.

Read Ellen Blue's fictional narrative first.

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Religious communities have long helped cultivate humanistic practices. We don't often think of ourselves in this way—but what if we did?