On Aug 15 the feast of Mary rsquo s Assumption a homeless Chaucer scholar on antipsychotic drugs has a vision that convinces him that 14-year-old Francesca Dunn is the Virgin pregnant with the Savior Certain he rsquo s been elected to serve and protect her Chester finds the girl at a Colorado

We can be forgiven if we think the spirituality of aging applies only to the septuagenarians among us, but aging is a tricky term, for we are aging from the instant of our conception, and then there is the matter of perception. Victor Hugo noted that Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth

A few years ago the late Lou Bannan, S.J. was presiding at the noontime Mass on a first Friday of the month at Santa Clara University. In his homily he told us about ferrying a group of older retreatants to the San Jose airport and hearing them rave about a fellow Jesuit who’d wowed them with

Writing of his need to keep a journal Verlyn Klinkenborg indicates in The Rural Life that he hopes it will be a conscientious record of the count of crows in the field every afternoon If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard I want to mention the fact If one of the horses throws a shoe

In this disarmingly honest and haunting memoir the former governor of Nebraska and United States senator Bob Kerrey tells the story of his rite of passage from a rather na iuml ve and carefree childhood in the 1950 rsquo s Midwest to his transformation into a skeptical Vietnam veteran with the Cong

In his 40th year Chris Offutt took his wife and two sons home to the hills of eastern Kentucky so he could teach creative writing at Morehead State University his alma mater which he confesses was more of a high school with ashtrays than a genuine college Even the location was not much just a

Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a fiction writer. The vocation was inchoate at first, for books seem as authorless as rain to a child, but it insisted that I not only inhabit the world imagined by others, as good readers do, but go on with the story, configure it to fit my own life

Seven years ago in 'Acts A Writer: Reflections on the Church, Writing and His Own Life,' novelist Larry Woiwode interleaved his idiosyncratic meditations on Luke's narrative of the first Apostles with his own story of giving up an English professor's job in upstate New York.

Robert Clark rsquo s parents divorced when he was two and his father died of polio three years later so he found himself in the care of his grandfather Griggs who owned a house in a forest of jack pine and spruce in northern Wisconsin and that house is for him the location of his childhood The

This is an excerpt from his essay on the Eucharist in the forthcoming collection, Signatures of Grace (edited by Thomas Grady and Paula Huston; E. P. Dutton; a Catholic Book Club selection). I first received Christ in the Eucharist in 1955. It was Dec. 8, the feast of Mary’s Immaculate Concept