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Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers & The Good Life

Mark Sundeen's book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America Mark Sundeen's The Unsettlers: In Search of the...

Constance Fenimore Woolson and Zoar

Constance Fenimore Woolson Linking “utopian” communal groups and American women writers in Italy, I spoke last weekend on Constance Fenimore Woolson...

An American Woman in 19th-Century Palestine

Occasionally I read a not-recently-published book that moves me so that I wonder how I missed it when it first appeared. ...

Transitions in Gender and Spirituality: Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka

In the spring of 1962, within a month of my birth and just before his death, Lobzang Jivaka finished composing his spiritual autobiography in India....
Vida Dutton Scudder

Vida Dutton Scudder, Christian Socialist for Several Generations

Yesterday my son, just returned from grad school,  told me he's writing an essay on Vida Dutton Scudder.  Before stating her name, he hesitated.  Why...

Damanhur: An Italian Earth-Centered Community

"Damanhur: Sustaining Changes in an Intentional Community," is the first chapter in the book Spiritual and Visionary Communities: Out to Save the World. In it I probe...

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri  (Knopf 2016)

Jhumpa Lahiri begins her memoir of two years in Italy with a water metaphor. Rather than thirst in Rome’s heat or a watery rebirth, the...

Italy: A Recent Group Experience

In the spring of 2016 I met several times with a group of adults in preparation for a pilgrimage to Italy. With a theme of syncretism,...