An Artist’s Advent

Wait. Prepare. The fulfillment is coming. Wait. Prepare. Every year, I begin teaching my church choir a new anthem for Christmas in August. To prepare for Christmas is not the work of four weeks, but more than four months. To prepare to begin preparing takes even...

Memento Mori: Notre Dame

…Until you return to the ground from which you were taken: For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return. – Genesis 3:19 Notre Dame Cathedral was built of earth—of stone and wood, of glass made from sand, of metals that were mined. For better or worse, she will be...

Mining the Public Domain

As you may have heard, because of a 1998 revision to U.S. copyright law, January 1, 2019 marked the first time in more than 20 years that any copyrighted work entered the public domain. And while we all rush to download legal copies of works by Robert Frost and Edith...

The Art of Plagiarism

Artistic influence is a strange, enigmatic, and terrifying realm. To probe it even superficially reveals the strands of threads that lead to words like copying and theft. I remember in high school having to learn the sources from which Shakespeare took his plays—Romeo...

The Marian Effect

As I wrote about recently, I had the honor to serve on a panel called “The Marian Effect: Building Strong Women in Writing and Life” at the Trying to say ‘God’ Conference at Notre Dame in June. We now a have Facebook page established by my...