I have found myself warming to the Church in a way I have not for decades. For some time I have been roaming in what I call the Catholic diaspora. Sometimes it is a choice to side-step the rules that feel untenable at the time. Choices are made, and before long there is a sense of no turning back. Then a voice speaks: Hearing Pope Leo exercise his moral authority over the current aberration playing out before the world gives me heart. A Vatican correspondent who has covered wars around the...

. . . among the sheep and cows. Sounds a bit drastic like choosing to chuck it all and check into a convent -- or live in an anchorage like Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century. Drastic or tempting? Farmland and wind turbines, St. Patrice de Beaurivage, Quebe c, Canada If it seems drastic to go low-tech it may be because of how far we have wandered from such a life. The next generation, my grandkids, are yearning to break-up with their endless connections through social media. At one...

Boston Common No Kings These five women holding up the iconic symbol of freedom were most likely unaware when they created their cardboard cutouts that they themselves would become symbolic as "Mothers of Exiles"-- a line in the poem embronzed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.* A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.* I was among the 180,000 Americans huddled in 30-degree sunshine with my daughter to lift the flame of hope....