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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Sometimes God shows up in unlikely places. Take church for example. This past Sunday during the prayers of the people, a beautiful couple stood up to ask the congregation to agree with them in faith that their little boy would be healed from cerebral palsy. I remembered this couple well: on Easter Sunday, they had…

In Italy I saw this shirt or some version of it all over the place, usually worn by young people. When I pointed it out to my husband (whose area of study frequently takes him to Italy), he explained that much of the time Italians will wear T-shirts with logos or expressions whose meaning they…

Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was one of my traveling companions in Tuscany. Here Krakauer, who has developed a reputation for writing about the extremes of physical adventure (Into Thin Air, Into the Wild), turns his attention to extremes in religious belief, in this case Mormon fundamentalism. The…

Something about good food, wine, art and the charm of the Italian people here in Tuscany has kept me from writing the last two weeks. For that I am a bit sorry– but admittedly not very much. In the last two weeks, while my husband teaches a summer program in Montepulciano, I have had the…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Yesterday the dog trainer with the Atlanta Humane Society came to start a spate of in-home training sessions with our dog Roosevelt— this after Roosevelt had bitten a couple of neighbors, snapped at a child through our front fence and viciously attacked our other now geriatric dog Carter…

In the spirit of yesterday’s post offering 4 tips for following your God-given dream (a.k.a. personal calling), I’m giving a shout-out of support to fellow saint and sinner Amy who quit her cushy corporate job at Starbucks to pursue her dream of writing, producing and acting in her very first film. Amy and I swam…

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a short novel about a boy who follows his dream to find hidden treasure across the seas—only to discover that the treasure he sought was actually right under his nose where his dream first originated. It’s a strange and magical story for restless souls looking for “where their heart is.”…

  [A correction has been made to Joyce’s age in this latest version of the post.] And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. —1 Corinthians 13:13 Right now my father-in-law is waiting at the hospital for Joyce to die. Joyce is in her early nineties, and…

An audio version of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises has been keeping me company in the car; and has convinced me that Hemingway was a restless soul, too (by “restless,” I mean another soul looking for more purpose, more truth and more life). Set in post-World War 1 Paris, the book tells the story…

Today is momentous because I sent off the manuscript for GRACE STICKS to my editor. Another big note of thanks to fellow saint and sinner Michael Frost for his gracious foreword which he managed to muster seemingly effortlessly under short notice. In addition to being a lovely person, he is a gifted writer. If you…
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