When she was growing up in New York, Gloria Ascher was eager to learn Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language her parents brought from Izmir, Turkey. “Teach me that song,” Ascher would say to her mother, who didn’t encourage the language that she told her d… Continue reading
Sitting at my desk, I glance out the window at the sun and ponder where I am relative to the monastic hours. 7:30 a.m. is about halfway between Prime, the traditional morning prayer time for Christians, and Terce, which originally meant three hours aft… Continue reading
It’s 6:30 a.m., and I have just left my “holy corner,” where I sit alone every morning for an hour or two. The early morning is for me a sacred time, what the Celts call a “thin place,” where the gap between the sacred and the secular is very narrow. T… Continue reading
Elaine Pagels, 75, has lived through the best and the worst of times. She is the highly acclaimed author of a long list of scholarly, yet accessible, bestselling books, most notably The Gnostic Gospels; a renowned professor of religious history at Prin… Continue reading