by Toni McNaron | Mar 20, 2014 | Toni's Blog
At the Christmas Eve service at my church, the first half hour is choral music sung both by the large and excellent choir and by the congregation. One of the choir offerings this past year was a setting of “Mirabile Mysterium,” written by Anne Kilstofte...
by Toni McNaron | Mar 16, 2014 | Toni's Blog
When I heard that Pete Seeger had died, I felt like I’d lost an era of my own political life. In the mid-1970s, I was part of a large audience in Minneapolis that fell in love with the singer and his songs. We all know that the Hudson River would have died...
by Toni McNaron | Jan 3, 2014 | Toni's Blog
In a review of a new book discussing Emily Dickinson’s 52 poems written on envelopes or parts thereof, Holland Cotter notices that some of these seem to match words to the shape of the paper. He speaks of one about “The way/Hope builds his/House”...
by Toni McNaron | Dec 20, 2013 | Toni's Blog
For the past few decades, most new books I’ve read have been written by women. There have been, of course, the occasional exception, e.g., Charles Frazer’s Cold Mountain, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, and more recently, Edmund DeWaal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. A...
by Toni McNaron | Dec 11, 2013 | Toni's Blog
I just set up the crèche in my living room, an act that gives me tremendous pleasure every December. Creches are supposed to focus on the manger scene with Mary and Joseph looking down on a crib housing the baby Jesus. Usually, creches include the 3 magi with their...
by Toni McNaron | Nov 12, 2013 | Toni's Blog
Earlier this week, I had the first public reading from my new memoir, Into the Paradox. The audience was attentive and responsive, asking me hard questions about how I manage to belong to a Catholic church, given my self-definitions. My response was rather lame: I...
