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November 18, 2025 
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Dear readers,
I was wholly unprepared a few years back when a close friend told me she was in the process of converting to Catholicism. Until that point I hadn’t seen a loved one embrace religion as an adult, and I wanted to understand the inner contours of her decision.
Normally, I’d reach for a book, my standard way to compensate for lack of experience. But the last novel I’d read with a devout Catholic at its heart was a surreal, amoral romp — hardly the avatar of virtue and enlightenment my friend was striving for.
I wish I’d had “Convent Wisdom” at the time. Its authors, two academics whose research burrows into the lives of Baroque nuns, rebut prevailing ideas about cloistered women, and show how 16th- and 17th-century sisters might offer answers to decidedly contemporary malaise.
Separately, please take a moment to marvel at the extensive planning Joan Didion undertook before hosting Thanksgiving meals — including buffets for as many as 75 guests. I appreciate and share Didion’s view of the kitchen: that it could be “a ritual, a meditation, a room and a time of my own.”
Though I’m grateful for her archives, I do feel that her detailed, post-meal notes about who arrived when and who ate what are frankly diabolical. But maybe Thanksgiving is always a little perverse?
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