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Thankfully, the pandemic restrictions are easing for many of us. Good news, indeed. But now we must look at the economic concerns of what it means for millions of people around the world to be out of work, businesses closed, and supply lines interrupted. As the media never tires of warning us, the possibility of a depression looms.

As in my article a few weeks ago on plagues and pandemics, I again turn to literature for guidance and perspective. I recently met with a book club in another state—over Zoom, of course. I asked their members what they were reading and learned many were reading novels set during the Great Depression. 'It is comforting to see how others have handled things,' one lady said. 'Seeing others endure can help us...

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Now, there’s a cheery topic, if I ever heard one. Actually, though, the thing is that it is good news. I know that many of my readers have heard me say before that the great thing I learned from writing Glastonbury, which covers 1500 years of history, is that, no matter how dark the present may seem, times have always been worse before—and humanity has always survived. And triumphed.

Perhaps in the spirit of “Misery loves company,"  which was one of my mother’s favorite sayings, and even more appropriately, in tune with the Lenten hymn that begins, “Now let us all with one accord, In...

About the year 425

Ireland

The April countryside slid past the little coracles gliding up the River Boyne. All was a patchwork of every imaginable shade of green, from the forest black of ancient hill junipers to the tinted yellow of newborn shoots of spring wheat. And around every rath and on every hillside, baby lambs bleated, tottering after their mothers. Rocks, trees, and clouds shaded the land with blue, purple, and gray shadows, and Patrick thanked God that he and his fellow missionaries should have arrived at this wonderful season of the renewing of life.

Patrick took a deep breath of the fresh, moist air and shook his head at the wonder that he should be returning here—to the very land where he had been held as captive; to the very people for whom he had labored as a slave for six years. Renewed life, indeed. A time of studying in a monastery in France had kindled his passion to bring the light of Christ to these people who once enslaved him. And here he was back in Ireland on the very eve of Jesus’ victory over death....

While our world is in the grip of the Covid-19 virus, it’s instructive to ponder how history repeats itself. And how Good ultimately triumphs. Here, lifted from the pages of my newly re-released Where Love Calls, book 6 in the Where There is Love Series, we have scenes from China, 1880-1883, as another contagious epidemic rages. Yet, God brings glory from it.

T’ai-yuen Fu, capital of the province of Shansi, North China, was four hundred miles inland from the nearest port—six weeks by sea, then twenty days’ travel by foot and pony...

When I first heard of Angels Flight, Los Angeles’ unique funicular railway, I was fascinated, but thought that, like so many bits of history, it had crumbled with time. My friend Alice Duncan’s cozy murder mystery Angels Flight is set in 1920s Los Angeles. What fun for heroine Mercy Alcutt to ride that nifty one-stop train to work, I thought—such a shame such things don’t exist anymore.

How wrong I was. When my husband was planning our Anniversary celebration in Los Angeles recently, he stumbled across a...

 When German author E.T.A. Hoffman wrote his short story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” in 1816, he could have had no idea that he would be impacting children around the world for centuries.

Although the original story is far more complicated than the ballet version we are familiar with, the basic elements remain the same. It begins on Christmas Eve with Godfather Drosselmeyer bringing mechanical toys to the children. In true ...