We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.

The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.

Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.