TWENTY SOMETHING The rain fell heavy Monday morning in Des Moines, Iowa. Bleary-eyed travelers plotted alternative routes over eggs and potatoes at the Embassy Suites. A white-haired man wearing a Saturn shirt had heard it would be clearer in Columbia, Mo., than Kansas City, Mo., and decided to attempt the added hour of travel for […]

TWENTY SOMETHING The place infants nod off and teens open up is also where road-weary adults will probe their spirituality: in the car. That’s the secret behind a new religious community, the Little Poor Friars and Poor Nuns of Jesus and Mary, who dress and live like St. Francis of Assisi: in poverty, entirely dependent […]

TWENTY SOMETHING The old farmers used to say you should leave a field better than you found it. Sometimes that called for heavy lifting. Other times it just meant picking up a rock as you crossed and placing it at the field’s edge. That counsel stuck with Amy Hereford, who grew up on a 10-acre […]

TWENTY SOMETHING Spend a day in a surgery waiting room and you’ll witness a hundred quiet acts of mercy. Strangers gather for a host of reasons with a common cause: to sit beneath the slowest clock and wait it out. They make calls, utter prayers and flip through magazines, and in their anxiety, they extend […]

TWENTY SOMETHING It’s almost as if November’s Mass readings were written for election-weary Catholics, with their foreboding tones and calls for “perseverance” and “endurance” amid distress. “They will seize you and persecute you,” St. Luke warns. “Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,” St. Paul exhorts. […]

TWENTY SOMETHING When two 20-somethings slung a wire across rooftops in Boston, they were hoping to hear each other’s voices transmitted across that line. It worked, and they did, but in the process, they also picked up a far more exotic sound: powerful radio waves emitted from the sun. Alexander Graham Bell was 26 and […]