Segullah Journal

I SAT DOWN LATE one night and wrote a list. The week had been a hard one—missed events, kids, chaos, catastrophes. Everything had frustrated me, and the ease with which I became frustrated had infuriated me. Why does letting myself become angry make me more angry than just about anything else? So I made a [...]

THE BOYS AND I I brought our first harvest home from the farm in June—a whole sack of beet greens. The bag sat on the table most of the afternoon and well into the evening when dinner should already have been prepared because, frankly, not only were these the first beet greens of the year, they [...]

IN THE PHOTO I am leaning in stiffly, artificially, with an exaggerated smile. The man at my side is not leaning back. Although the couch is crowded with people, there is a visible gap between my grandfather and me—narrow, maybe, but deep. When I first pulled the picture out of the envelope, the only thing I [...]

GOD’S COUNTRY. That’s what my husband’s grandmother calls this land of rolling fields and sprawling cities. She grew up forty-five minutes from the University of Notre Dame, and when she heard Bryan had decided to come here for his PhD, she was thrilled. “You’ll absolutely love it there,” she told us. “That’s God’s country.” When it [...]

TOWARD THE END OF HIGH SCHOOL, WHEN I finally resigned myself to the fact that I could not build a university education around intramural volleyball, I began seriously looking for a “career path.” The problem was not a lack of options, but an overabundance. I was interested in, and moderately good at, just about anything my [...]

SEGULLAH IS NOT A WORD you will hear on the streets of Downtown, USA. You’re not even likely to hear it in the halls of academia. First of all, it’s Hebrew. Secondly, it’s based on a concept that is out of style. Segullah is about divinely instituted covenants, and about a people who take them seriously. “For [...]