A Gentle Madness is Nicholas Basbanes’ wonderful account of the bibliophile’s eternal passion for books and book collecting, and it could well have been the title for this review. Pradeep Sebastian’s ...

"This book contains the autobiographical works of Usama ibn Munqidh, a twelfth-century Arab aristocrat. Full of detail, wit and melancholy, Usama's narrative anecdotes illustrate the inscrutability of ...

Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century American writer on spirituality, began his book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961, New Directions) with the suggestion that contemplation is, "The highest ...

Carving out quiet time and space for contemplation can require an act of defiance in a modern world. "We're trained to jump from topic to topic to topic and thing to thing. How often in our culture do ...

This spring poetry review is a spring poetry anti-review. It is all so subjective isn’t it? After a collection of poems has already made it through the jangly rites of agents and editors and elegant ...

Cole: I stopped worrying about that stuff a while ago. I think we do have a responsibility to project stories in their complexities. We do the best we can. And when you’ve put all the layers into the ...

Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant. The five-day program brings together people from across the political ...

Just as you never step in the same river twice, you never return to the same Boundary Waters. Oh, it's still the BWCA, more than a thousand lakes on the border of Minnesota and Canada, lashed one to ...