Story and photographs by Mele Martinez Sunset is the best time to view the “Pink Rose of the Desert,” the monastery built in midtown Tucson in 1939 to house the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. When the sun reaches the horizon, the building’s facade reflects the orange and purple desert sky. Flanked by tall palm trees, the monastery’s ... [Continue Reading]
LumiNight: A Love Letter to Winter in the Desert
In mid-December near downtown Tucson you might spot a procession of people in costume, lit up by homemade cardboard lanterns. Called LumiNight, the event is “kind of like a reverse wintertime Halloween for grown-ups, complete with dressing up and running around at night,” says Jhon Sanders, who initiated the festivity to celebrate the dark ... [Continue Reading]
Dark Nights: The Spiritual Promise of Grief Work
Mary Kay LeFevour is a bereavement specialist with Tucson Medical Center Hospice. An ordained interfaith minister, a title she sought out specifically to qualify her to be a hospice chaplain, Mary Kay offers individual and group support for those who have lost family members. We spoke to her about the darkness of grief and its importance for ... [Continue Reading]
La Santa Muerte: The folk saint who asks no questions
by Jim Griffith, guest contributor La Santa Muerte (“Holy Death” or “Saint Death”) is an extremely popular Mexican folk saint who is not recognized by the Catholic Church, even though her devotion shares much of its structure, behavior, and worldview with Catholicism. A personification of Death, she is frequently represented as a robed and ... [Continue Reading]
Redrock Awakening: The Stupa of Sedona, Arizona
Most people visit Sedona, Arizona to marvel at the red rock walls and spires of sandstone surrounding the town. But on the west side of town, amidst the 14-acre “Peace Park,” another red structure rises from the landscape, this one built by human hands as a place of spiritual refuge and awakened compassion. The Amitabha Stupa is a 36-foot ... [Continue Reading]
Inside Tucson’s Primera Iglesia Bautista
On a searing hot morning in June, the front door of the Primera Iglesia Bautista/First Mexican Baptist Church on South Stone Avenue in Tucson is wide open. Women and children are carting cardboard robots, board games, and unused packages of paper plates and napkins from the building to cars and minivans parked outside. It’s the last day of ... [Continue Reading]
Living with the Orishas: Victor Navarro on Being a Babalocha
In 2011, Victor Navarro went to a party where a woman wearing white introduced him to a pantheon of deities—some fierce, some gentle—then tossed cowrie shells and read them to reveal something about his past, present, and future. Navarro was enchanted. “It was so interesting and accurate,” he said. The woman was a babalocha, a practitioner of ... [Continue Reading]
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