The Hearth We Inherit: On Saint Anne's Day and the Making of Home
Some holidays announce themselves. Others arrive so quietly you would miss them entirely if you weren't paying attention. This coming Sunday holds one of the quiet kind — in fact, it holds two, one nearly two thousand years older than the other, landing on the same date almost by coincidence. In the United States, the fourth Sunday of July is National Parents' Day, a modest civic observance established by Congress in 1994. On the older calendars of the Christian West, that same date carries the Feast of Saint Anne, traditionally honored as the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus — a figure venerated for well over a millennium as the patron of mothers, grandmothers, and the domestic hearth itself. The Grandmother Behind the Story Anne does not appear in the canonical Gospels. Her name and story come instead from the Infancy Gospel of James, a text likely composed in the second century, which filled in the biography the New Testament left blank. From there, her venera...
