Where to Start With Thomas Merton
Begin with the 1948 autobiography everyone quotes and the one contemplative book nobody outgrows — the reading order, editions named.
Santa Post
Latest
Marilynne Robinson Took On Genesis, and the Reviews Argued About What She Found
What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
What Did the Dead Sea Scrolls Actually Change About the Bible?
A 1947 find near Qumran pushed the oldest known Hebrew Bible manuscripts back a thousand years — here is what the scrolls do, and do not, tell readers about the text's history.
Reading
All →
Where to Start With Annie Dillard
Tinker Creek first, then the short fierce books — a reader's map of spiritual writing without a confession.
Where to Start With the Desert Fathers
The Sayings are a book of shards, not a manual — how to read a tradition of one-line wisdom.
Where to Start With Augustine's Confessions
Thirteen books, three good translations, and permission to change pace after Book 9.
How to Read the Book of Job
A prose frame around the fiercest argument in Scripture — structure, translations, and where readers stumble.
Culture
All →
How Is the Talmud Structured? A Reader's Primer
The Mishnah, the Gemara, six orders, two versions, and a page layout unchanged since a sixteenth-century Venice printer — plus where to start reading it, free, in translation.
Why the Hindu Epics Keep Being Retold
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana present themselves as already retold, which is why every era from Kamban to the present adds its own telling instead of replacing one.
How to Read a Gothic Cathedral
Plan, glass, portal and labyrinth: a Gothic cathedral is a building that can be followed like an argument, once you know where the sentences are.
Why Islamic Calligraphy Became Sacred Art
Where the revelation was a book, the highest visual honor fell not on the image but on the letter — measured, gilded, and trained into a discipline that still awards licenses today.
Spotlight
The Bible in the Drawer
Founded by salesmen in 1899, the Gideons turned the hotel nightstand into the quietest library in the world.
The Scroll That Closed a Thousand-Year Gap
The Great Isaiah Scroll, found in a Qumran cave in 1947, let readers hold a Hebrew Bible text a millennium older than any known before it — and trace, jar to vault, how that survival was verified.
Robert Alter: The Hebrew Bible
AI Dating Pushes Some Dead Sea Scrolls a Century Older
A new radiocarbon-and-machine-learning study puts several biblical manuscripts from Qumran closer to their authors' own lifetimes than paleography ever allowed.
Essays
View all →
What We Mean by Spiritual Reading
Lectio divina, four rungs, and a mouthful of text: a definition by way of Guigo II.
Other People’s Margins
Glosses, colophons, inscriptions, pencil: the second text inside every used religious book.
Bonhoeffer: Letters and Papers from Prison
Theology smuggled out of cell 92: Bonhoeffer’s Tegel letters and the idea he did not live to finish.
Kathleen Norris: The Cloister Walk
A Protestant poet among Benedictines, and what years of psalms at fixed hours do to a writer’s ear.
Faith News
View all →
Where to Start With Thomas Merton
Where to Start With the Bhagavad Gita
Latter-day Saints Add Ten Hymns, Including Watts and Wesley-Era Classics
The July 23, 2026 release brings the forthcoming hymnal 'Hymns — for Home and Church' to eighty-two available songs, with the printed collection due in 2027.
Romanian Holy Synod Elects New Metropolitan of Bessarabia
Bishop Antonie of Bălți was elected Archbishop of Chișinău on July 2, 2026, filling a see vacated by the withdrawal of Metropolitan Petru after three decades.
Art News
View all →
Notre-Dame Opens a €130 Million Drive for Its Final Restoration Phase
The public body rebuilding the cathedral has priced its last program of works at €150 million, with about a fifth in hand and the rest sought from donors.
Comparing Translations of the Tao Te Ching
The Business Behind the Christy Awards
Christian fiction's top industry prize returns to Nashville in November — a reminder of how a niche publishing market keeps itself visible to itself.
Christie’s London Books and Manuscripts Sale Sets a Record
The Valuable Books and Manuscripts sale of July 8, 2026 realized £12.7 million, with a seven-hundred-year-old Arthurian romance leading the medieval lots.