By: Julia Somerset Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of my favorite poets. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, and she wrote beautifully about the significantly disruptive changes that took place in the first half of the 20th century. This is a...
By: Julia Somerset My picture of God is different whenever I experience change. I am now feeling settled after a recent cross-country move and career change. When I return to the Bible and feel renewed in my prayer life after all the chaos, I find that I am...
By: Julia Somerset Romantic love is the subject of one of the richest traditions in written history. People have been falling in love as long as they have been on this earth, and they started writing about it as soon as they had the ability. Romance causes more...
By: Julia Somerset The title of this post is from a poem by Charles Williams, who was a member of the Inklings, the famous literary group of friends that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other exceptional intellectuals. In this poem, Williams makes the point...
By: Julia Somerset "Who the Meek Are Not" By Mary Karr Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep in the rice-paddy muck, nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles make the wheat fall in waves they don't get to eat. My...
By: Julia Somerset I have been rereading some great Christian works lately, and I recently came across a section of Dante’s Divine Comedy that grabbed me. The Comedy is divided into three sections: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Purgatory is my...
By: Julia Somerset “Choose” By Carl Sandburg The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other. I first read this poem right after one of the first big failures...
By: Julia Somerset I recently came across this simple line from Pope Benedict XVI: "One who has hope lives differently." My husband spent the first year of our marriage deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. The challenges of that year overwhelmed me,...
By: Julia Somerset “Childhood scenes rushed back at me out of the night, strangely close and urgent. Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them,...
By Julia Somerset “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep” By Robert Frost The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass A ship keeps raising its hull; The...