by Jessica McDougald | Apr 20, 2021 | Opinion
It seemed to rain every day for weeks during February in central North Carolina. The temperature also didn’t rise above 40 degrees, which is downright arctic for our area. The COVID-19 cases were still startlingly high; everything was muddy and dark and still; it...
by Jessica McDougald | Apr 7, 2021 | Opinion
My desk at the church office sits right beside a full wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, so I can see a great deal of the back of the church. The mailbox, so I know when to go out for the mail. The fountain with the stone statue of a flame, representing the Holy...
by Jessica McDougald | Feb 17, 2021 | Opinion
My mom and I have been sneaking off to Catholic Mass each Ash Wednesday morning for the past few years. We spend the hour soaking our Baptist bones in Catholic liturgy and leave with dark smudges on our foreheads. My mom is the director of a preschool at a local...
by Jessica McDougald | Jan 19, 2021 | Opinion
The Divine Offices are an ancient monastic practice of praying specific prayers at specific times throughout the day that I encountered years ago. Fascinated by this concept, I searched for books of these prayers and found one by Phyllis Tickle. At the time, I had no...
by Jessica McDougald | Oct 30, 2020 | Opinion
I don’t know if you’ve been on Facebook lately or really any social media outlet. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news or read your neighbor’s posts on Nextdoor. I don’t know if you’ve gotten as much campaign mail as I have recently. If you haven’t,...
