Features

Los Angeles is home to more hummingbirds than any U.S. city. Student researchers are tracking mother hummingbirds’ energy expenditure in nests across the LMU campus.

For our series on The Seven Deadly Sins, Jason S. Sexton writes about pride.—The Editor “Forget about the other six, says Pride.They’re only using you.”—Dana Gioia, “The Seven Deadly Sins” It set the course of early Californians, fortune seekers and land stealers, leading them to find their way here for centuries to enjoy fruit of […]

In his essay about gluttony, poet Oliver de la Paz ’96 writes about his father’s dress shirts, tube socks, guns and issues of National Geographic magazine.

Brendan Busse, S.J., writes about anger in our series on The Seven Deadly Sins.—The Editor I was recently sorting through old files and came across a letter my father had written while I was away on a weeklong retreat in high school. Complimenting my tolerance of some of the craziness in our family, he wrote, […]

Listen to Paul Harris give a reading of his poem on greed. His poem, below, is part of our series on The Seven Deadly Sins.—The Editor The Greed-E Text These E-tethered sentences self-reference Greed’s relentless self-centeredness. These endlessly meted E’s represent Greed’s speech’s needless excess. The text’s extreme repetend effect resembles Greed’s me-me-ME reverb. The […]

The Seven Deadly Sins may be centuries old, but they’re not going away: pride, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, anger and, by no means least, lust. We asked writers and members of the LMU community for a personal take on each of the sins. An essay by Denise Hamilton ’81 on lust is below. Elsewhere, Susan […]

Lynell George ’84, journalist and essayist, collects people’s stories as part of her job. Ambition is one thing, but lately, she says, she’s been hearing a lot of envy, a form of myopia that causes blindness. Read her diagnosis here.

In our feature on The Seven Deadly Sins, novelist Susan Straight writes about sloth.—The Editor Proverbs 19:15: Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger. Since I was not raised in a religious household but by a Swiss mother, from a country famous for perfectionism, where no one would consider […]

If the question “Why am I here?” is the most foundational question humans ask themselves, then “What is sin?” must be second. The Seven Deadly Sins have been with us for centuries. Their guise may change, but their appeal never weakens. Here we examine the Seven Deadly Sins — they’re still with us, as deadly as ever.

Lisa See’s“The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane” is a story of separation in China’s Yunnan Province and its impact on lives thereafter. Read an excerpt here.