In late September, Brittany Howard released her first solo album and embarked on a two-month international tour. The album, Jaime, takes its name from the older sister who taught Howard to play the piano and who died of cancer as a teenager. A short half-hour and eleven tracks long, Jaime artfully unfolds its maker’s history: her loves, perspective, anxieties and wounds. To work on this … Continue reading Music Review: Brittany Howard, Jaime
In Rockford, Illinois, a faded, yellow-brick ranch house sits between a large wood and the helicopter pad at the Emergency Unit of Saint Anthony Medical Center. The house, which boasts more paintings and statues of saints than pieces of furniture, serves as a convent for the three Franciscan sisters who work at Saint Anthony’s—one of whom is my biological sister. While visiting recently, my parents … Continue reading Looking into Schedules: Thoughts on Time, Self-Gift, and the Joy of Boundaries
In that last week of clammy August malaise that inevitably precedes the start of the semester, my family and I often go to the “second-hand” theater a couple of blocks away in search of discounted entertainment and free air-conditioning. This past summer, our feature of choice was Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Neville’s documentary sketches the life of Fred Rogers, whose unique careers … Continue reading The Root of Everything: Witnessing Divine Love in “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
