Listen to the survivors
Some churches are starting the long process of reckoning with their role in the horrors of Indigenous boarding schools.
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My father s last decision
On Christmas morning, he told us: he was considering suicide.
I hear no voice
Prayers for Children and the apophatic tradition
Surviving Hillcrest
It was on a Friday in spring 2021 that Letta Cartlidge decided she had seen enough.
In her backyard in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a stack of bangles on her arm and an oversized cardigan draped around her shoulders, Cartlidge explained to the Century how on April 15, 2021, James McDowell, a former principal at Hillcrest—a boarding school primarily for the children of missionaries in Jos, Nigeria—admitted in a private Facebook group for Hillcrest alumni that he had “molested” two students during his tenure.
My fertility journey with Mary
My mother didn’t like the name Mary: too Catholic. And she didn’t much like my grandmother for whom I was named: too Baptist. But she did believe in giving her children proper names after their grandparents, so in the end, tradition won out. I was named Mary after my father’s Virginian mother but called Polly “for short,” even though it’s longer.
Reading The Waste Land as it turns 100
T. S. Eliot’s epic poem is a masterpiece—but what do we do with its view of classical Western tradition?
Who owns the heavens
Neil Armstrong was sure he’d said “a.” One small step for a man. Not one small step for man, which wouldn’t have made sense. He’d thought about it for months before the flight, finally scrawling the sentence on a piece of scrap paper during a game of Risk with his brother. His brother thought it sounded great. Poor Neil, having to be a poet in addition to a pilot and an engineer and an astronaut.