A writer considers the meaning of sacred space
Long before the evangelical and Pentecostal Christians of my childhood held tent revivals, my forebears built booths and tabernacles in the desert, sides open to Ruach ha-olam, Breath of the Universe that animates and sustains us, that blows life into adamah and all the creatures on Earth.
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A new perspective on the City of Lights
This spring, I returned to Paris for the first time — with almost two decades of marriage, three kids, a freshly minted technical college diploma, and a new career in construction under my belt. The city looked very different.
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A writer measures her life by October weekends at the Southern Festival of Books
The Southern Festival of Books is the place I came from and the place I return to, and it is the place where my literary forebears live on through the miraculous immortality of books.
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A bibliophile confronts her stash of unread books
My unread books had all survived several cullings, which meant that I must have repeatedly decided they were worth reading. So it seemed time to do just that.
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A Chapter 16 writer remembers the first moon landing
I happened to be at an afternoon performance under the tent on July 20, 1969, when the conductor suddenly halted the orchestra in mid-flight, turned to the audience, and shouted in a joyful voice, “I’ve just been informed that the Americans have landed on the moon!” Then he turned to the orchestra and whipped it into the Star-Spangled Banner.
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An author finds his own teenage ghost in a thrift-shop book
What I saw was not a dusty old book but a boy in a wheelchair by a window in a ramshackle house farther east in Tennessee—two hours away, on the Cumberland Plateau near Crossville.
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