Flannery O’Connor was not a casual Catholic. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs,” she writes in “The Habit of Being,” a collection of her letters. “They think faith is a big ...

How should one pray? Not even the Psalmists or the disciples knew the answer. The Psalms are filled with pleas for God to place words on the tongues of believers; the disciples were even so bold as to ...

“Don’t ever let me think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — Just like the typewriter was mine.” “What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh, Lord, I am saying, ...

Tess Taylor reviews Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal written when the late author was in her early 20s. Every so often, as scholars sort through old papers, they find a rare and wonderful gem, ...

There is something breathtaking in the hopes, dreams and faith of young Flannery O’Connor. What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh, Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a ...

A Prayer Journal presents the surviving pages of a Sterling notebook filled during O’C onnor’s time at the University of Iowa. Her entries read like letters, as W.A. Sessions, an O’C onnor expert who ...

How was the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount? When the son of God did stand-up for the multitudes, were there hecklers? The Bible, in its reader-unfriendly way, disdains to tell us. Jesus rips through ...

Augustine’s Confessions is the story of a soul. It is the account of a soul that once had a rigid, fairly intelligible story for itself. For some thirty years, Augustine told the same story of his ...

Lately, my prayers have become a form of artistic expression: Carefully chosen words, praise reports like songs, and sometimes pissed-off pronouncements entwined with polite requests that I please not ...

Read 8 Ash Wednesday Prayers to Prepare Your Heart for Lent + BONUS 40-Day Prayer Journal by Judy McEachran and more articles ...