Not by Bread Alone
Prayerfully journey through Lent with inspiring and meaningful reflections on the daily Mass readings. In just a few minutes each day, the insightful meditations of Not by Bread Alone can deepen your experience of this solemn season of prayer and penance.
Forthcoming from Liturgical Press, November 15, 2026.
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Lost in translation
Se’vIr lIngDI’ tamlertej, tlhIngan Hol QaQ law’ DIvI’ Hol QaQ puS
(Should chemists publish in Klingon rather than English?)
I found the book tucked among the organic chemistry texts, manuals for ancient software, models of improbable molecules, and the odd coffee mug — thankfully clean — left behind on the lab shelves by several generations of departing research students. The cover of Chemistry Through the Language Barrier promised readers they could learn to scan the chemical literature in any language, including Russian and Japanese. I have loved languages as long as I can remember. I am competent in German and Spanish, and can claim a smattering of Italian, Swahili, Latin, Greek, ASL and Klingon. Intrigued, and looking for an excuse to take a break from clearing out the lab, I pulled the book off the shelf and skimmed the foreword.
The author of the foreword argued that the time for specific language requirements for graduate students in chemistry was past. It was, after all, 1969, and the array of languages in which chemistry was published was expanding rapidly beyond the German, French and English triumvirate. What should replace it? Certainly not FORTRAN, he sniffed. Having led the expansion of the language requirement in my department in the late 1980s to include FORTRAN, I would disagree. Who wrote this? I skipped to the end to see a familiar name. My late father-in-law. A crystallographer with a deep love of language.
The language barrier for chemists today looks very different from the 1940s when James Perry published a series of lessons in Russian for chemists...
Read the full article in the April 2026 issue of Nature Chemistry for my take on the auxiliary languages of science, and what we can learn from considering a Klingon option.
Hope Among the Ashes
Ashes are everywhere this morning. Scattered on the street in anticipation of an ice storm tonight, they ping against the bottom of my car as I head to Mass. The once white, bright snowbank at the back of the church parking lot is pockmarked with the ashes from previous storms. The sky is the color of ash, the bare tree limbs thin charcoal strokes against the horizon. The carbon in my pencil crumbles onto the paper, as I craft tomorrow’s lecture. Without thinking I brush my forehead only to feel the dry crunch of the ashes I was signed with a few hours earlier, and realize my notes, too, are now smudged, bits of the sacred clinging to the once pristine page. Ashes everywhere indeed.
I can find it hard to catch glimpses of hope in this dulled and ashen landscape. Yet as those same ashes that tarnish the snow drifts give me traction on the ice, today’s ashes help me remain steady on Lent’s path. Their branches stripped of their leaves, the trees no longer obscure my view of the sunset. This bare Lenten landscape likewise offers a clarity of vision.
“Remember,” all these ashes seem to say to me. Remember that you, too, are crafted from dust and ashes, the stuff of stars and the stuff of earth. Remember that everything is sacred, that everything that is brushed by ashes is also aflame with grace.
From Not By Bread Alone 2027
