Stephanie Paulsell
Song for a time of terror
The Song of Songs is about cherishing everything that makes another human being distinctive. It's the opposite of indiscriminate violence.
Seeing through Piero
Reviewers of the Piero della Francesca exhibit seem to want to hold the Renaissance painter's genius close but his religion at arm's length.
This is 50
The journals of Merton, Woolf and others encouraged me to see my birthday as a new beginning—and to live my 50th year as a year of jubilee.
Soul experiments
What are university churches for? Are they nostalgic relics, settings for academic rites, anomalies in uneasy relationship with schools' priorities?
Saints and doubters
Are faith and doubt opposites? Thérèse of Lisieux and Virginia Woolf are part of the same history.
Connections that last
Photographer Noel Vicentini captured the end of the Shaker paradise, Eden going to seed. He seemed especially interested in places of joining.
The right note
Faith, as Marcelo learns in Franciso X. Stork's young-adult novel, is following the music when we don't hear it.
In Woolf's footsteps
During spring break I made a pilgrimage. With my husband and my daughter, I traced the path Virginia Woolf took through Italy in 1908.
Monkish ways
As a graduate student, my father visited the Abbey of Gethsemani. His experiences there entered him in some permanent way.
Devotional difference
When I first came to Harvard, the weekly
worship service was recognizably Protestant but flexible and welcoming. Over the years, our students have urged us toward
new ways of gathering.
Faking it
Can I be a minister for others, many students wonder, if my own beliefs are in flux?
To dwell in possibility
When my daughter was confirmed in the Christian faith
last spring, I gave her Emily Dickinson's poem, "I dwell in Possibility."
Veiled voices
For many women, the hijab has become a symbol of striving for gender and racial justice.
Welcomed to ministry
Our service ended with a Eucharist, celebrated at an
imposing altar. I
learned to make my gestures big, to open my arms wide, to lift the cup
above my head. What I never quite got the hang of was the chanting.
Second-semester longings
I wasn't sure how many people I would find at our first weekly Eucharist
of the term. Driving was impossible, even if one mustered the will to
dig out one's car for the third time in three weeks.
Shared devotion
The deep attention and reverence that Thomas Merton and Abdul Aziz brought to each other's books, traditions and lives undergirded their friendship, and the frank way they explored their similarities and differences enlivened it.
On the road
So much seems possible when we are traveling. We encounter new people and get to know familiar people in new ways as we share meals, chores and adventures.
Wired and unwired: We are losing our capacity for sustained attention
In 1993, not so terribly long ago, I signed up for my first e-mail account....
Deep messages: Language and love
When I read in the newspaper recently that the U.S....
Treasure box: A beloved monk's collection
When I was a child I knew all the dips in the asphalt in my neighborhood, all the places where, if I pedaled really fast, I could for one blissful moment—down, up!—feel as if I were flying.
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