House Art Journal

Since our May Mary altar turned out so wonderfully, I could not resist making a Sacred Heart altar for June. Although this is not my favorite picture of Our Lord's Sacred Heart, I have a sentimental attachment to it, since it was given to our family by our late former pastor, Father Bill Ruhl, when we first moved to Front Royal and consecrated our family home to the Sacred Heart. It seemed only fitting to have our "family statues" all present on the altar this month, along with mulberry branches and trailing vines. "I am the Vine: you are the branches," He tells us. "Remain in Me and you will bear much fruit, fruit that will last." May God bless you and your family this month!

Ironically, as a novelist, I rarely read fiction any more. I'm not sure why. I know I find it hard to read fiction and write fiction at the same time. Perhaps I'm turning into my father, who has a voracious appetite for books on history, theology, psychology, sociology, and politics, but rarely samples fiction. When I was young, I read every story I could get my hands on. Now my bedside table has a history of the American Revolution, a book of essays on culture, Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, and other nonfiction. But this summer, it now features the novels of Edna Ferber. I came to Ferber late towards the end of my fiction-reading period, and I don't rightly know when I first read SoBig . Early in my marriage, I had a copy that looks exactly like this one pictured above: who knows where I found it? I have a taste for old books, regardless of their contents, and I started this one, and was hooked on Ferber's lush writing style and her portraits of humanity, ne