Money is a subject that has always held endless difficulty and fascination for me. At 20 I entered a convent, embracing a sacred vow of poverty and refusing to have anything to do with owning money. At 38, I left that order and had to face financial reality again. I worked in the service of the chur

Several years ago my husband, Jim, and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary in San Francisco. It was a vacation to remember, but not because of the sights. I went home with much more than I came with. It began one morning after leaving a bookstore in Union Square. We saw a bearded old man sitt

When my father passed through the gates of Ellis Island as a boy, the life that awaited him would be new and exciting yet fated with a grinding scarcity. For decades, all Dad had to show for it was hard work, more hard work and very little money. Still, before he knew it, this once faceless immigran

For longer than I knew, my father’s Arabic-language Bible lay on the dining table, a thick, gold-leafed tome, warm and fragile with years of page-turning, the family’s sacred text that had sustained Dad on his long journey from Syria to America. That Bible now sits atop my own bookshelf.