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The Carthusians of Vermont

In a hollow just north of Bennington, Vermont, near the New York state line, nineteen monks at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration live and die in seclusion. It’s the only Carthusian site in North America, a remote spot in the shadow of Mt. Equinox, highest peak in the Taconic Range. In 2005 . . . . Continue Reading »

Above the Thunderstorm

At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. Insofar as they are perceptible at all, religious have retreated to the margins of our imaginative universe, as defendants in court cases, amiable extras in . . . . Continue Reading »

What Monks Do

I am in a 1982 Volvo, headed north on I-5 toward Oceanside, at a pace I could easily beat on a bicycle. A universe of cars spreads to the north and the south. Twenty-five miles, on a five-lane freeway, will take an hour or more. How can people live like this? The ordeal of rush hour in Southern . . . . Continue Reading »

Losing Their Religion

Nonverts—people who once identified with a religious tradition but now identify with none—are the fastest-growing group in surveys of American religion. They make up the great majority of those (now a quarter of the adult population) who say they have no religion. In this study, Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »

Hawthorne’s Daughter

In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist ­Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion she conceived a heroic ministry to destitute cancer patients at a time when cancer was believed to be contagious. She . . . . Continue Reading »

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