Marianne Dougherty

Marianne Dougherty

Hart and Soul

Hall of Fame coach Clyde Hart’s accomplishments are well-documented.  Coach to Olympic 400-meter champions Michael Johnson, Jeremy Wariner, and Sanya Richards-Ross, he also produced 34 NCAA champions and 566 NCAA All-Americans over the course of his 56-year career. A career highlight was being selected as men’s assistant coach for the 2000 Olympic Track & Field […]

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An Illuminated Bible for a New Millennium

In 1998 Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, commissioned renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson (he was senior scribe to Queen Elizabeth II) to create a handwritten and illuminated Bible similar to the richly embellished manuscript Bibles that monks produced in workshops during the Middle Ages. The first Benedictine illuminated Bible to be completed since

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The Music Man

Senior lecturer of piano Dr. Bradley Bolen admits he was hesitant when Dr. John Ferguson, founder and executive director of American Voices, called him in 2009 to do some teaching in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “I didn’t think anyone in Iraq would care about the arts because they’d been through so much tragedy,” he said,

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A Marriage of True Minds

Theirs was a love story for the ages with all the passion and intrigue of a Victorian-era romance — a courtship that included 573 love letters and a secret marriage at St. Marylebone Church in London on September 12, 1846, over her tyrannical father’s objections. He later disinherited her, and she never saw him again after she and her husband started a new life in Italy, where their son was born three years later. His given name was Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, but they called him Pen. Though inseparable during their lifetimes, the lovers are buried nearly a thousand miles apart: Elizabeth in the Protestant Cemetery in Florence and Robert in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, London. Six years his senior, Elizabeth was just 55 when she died in her husband’s arms at their home in Florence of chronic lung disease. Father and son moved back to London where Browning established himself as a leading literary figure. He never married again, nor did he visit Florence after his wife’s death. Then in 1889 while visiting Pen at his home in Venice, Browning died of natural causes. He was 77 years old.

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