RMDell'Orfano

Compensatory Sainthood

We fund statues, celebrate heroes, and ignore the truth. Why societies create saints—and what it costs when the myth collapses.

Now I Am Become Death— the Destroyer of Worlds

A lone two-lane desert road stretches toward a vanishing horizon beneath a threatening sky, as a swirling dust cloud rises and sparse flora—creosote, yucca, and cactus—line the silent, perilous path.

The ‘Colored Only’ Fountain

In 1969, passing through Atlanta on a Greyhound bus, I drank from a fountain marked “Colored Only”—and waited to see what would happen.

Food Can Kill … or Cure

A sudden illness sends a young pilgrim to Boston’s Rising Sun clinic, where he encounters a radical idea: food itself may be the body’s first medicine.

At age twenty-six in the summer of 1968, I visit the Bruderhof community in northern Connecticut, stepping through its stone wall and wrought-iron gate into a pastoral world that feels suspended in time.

When Providence Moves …

In the summer of 1968, a hitchhiking pilgrim experiences Providence in motion, receives unexpected hospitality in Amherst, and witnesses a startling moment at a Connecticut turkey farm.

The Medicine

A young man leaves the ordered stillness of an abbey and steps onto a dusty road, choosing solitude and faith over security in this memoir excerpt from Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous.

Rhetorical Mercy

Real compassion is harder because it requires juggling two truths at once—without dropping either.

Terror in the Night

A night of shelter at a remote monastery descends into terror when a fellow traveler appears at the foot of the bed with a knife. What follows is a silent vigil of fear, prayer, and survival beneath the Abbey’s ancient walls.

Atlas Shrugged In California

California is living Atlas Shrugged: inventiveness collapses, elites drift, billionaires exit—and Joe Sixpack inherits the bill.