“I am a human being, I’m a Buddhist monk, I am a Westerner,” says this sophisticated photographer, and the Dalai Lama has also asked him to lead one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most important monasteries. More →

June 15, 2012

Brother Paul Quenon, who was inspired to write by his mentor Thomas Merton, says “the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life.” More →

May 6, 2011

Photography, according to Abbot Barnabas Senecal of St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison, Kansas, is an exercise in monastic mindfulness, and he says his pictures reflect “being aware of the presence of God with you and in the world.” More →

September 10, 2010

Abbot Barnabas Senecal, a Benedictine monk, reflects on the Psalms, prayer, photography, and the Benedictine desire “to seek God daily.” More →

September 10, 2010

In his book “Gray Land: Soldiers on War,” portrait and documentary photographer Barry Goldstein writes that “even at its best, day-to-day life in a combat zone has a corrosive effect on mind, body, and spirit.” More →

November 12, 2009

New York’s Yeshiva University Museum has opened an exhibit called “And I Still See Their Faces.” It’s made up primarily of family photographs of members of pre-war Poland’s once thriving Jewish community. Most of those remembered in the photographs did not survive the Holocaust. More →

April 13, 2007

Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in the original Star Trek television series, has a controversial new book called Shekhina, a photographic exploration of the presence of God. He says he was deeply influenced by the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah where the Shekhina, or the presence of God, took on a feminine form. More →

December 13, 2002