Jamie Janosz

Southern charm. I had heard about it, but I have never quite experienced it until I walked the gorgeous cobblestone streets of Savannah, Georgia. Recently, I took an entire week of vacation time and traveled a short 3 1/2 hour trip to Savannah. What a gorgeous, historical, romantic city! Milt, Sabrina and I met up with our good friends, the Obermaiers and visited SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) a school that both our daughter and their daughter are considering. In Savannah, we stayed at the B-Historic - a quaint hotel located right downtown. How great to be able to park our car for the entire visit and explore the city on foot. The first thing you'll notice about Savannah are the historic town squares. There is not just one beautiful square/park - as you find in many small Southern towns -  but dozens of them, arranged like a grid throughout the historic section of the city. Central to each one is a monument honoring a person of significance. Juliette...

In college, my friend Amy and I were shameless Flannery O'Connor groupies.  We were fellow writers and students at a midwest Bible college. In our Creative Writing course, the professor introduced us to many authors we had never read - but Flannery quickly became our favorite. Her characters were unexpected: disturbing, grotesque, and larger-than-life. Yet they were also ordinary - the type of people you might encounter at your local WalMart. They were overweight, loud-mouthed, some suffered deformities, others were drifters. They spoke crassly, and then (often in the same breath) they would speak about God. As she said so well, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." We had never read faith stories like these. Flannery O'Connor's stories were not the sanctified, made-for-tv Christian-novels we had grown up on by authors like Grace Livingston Hill or Janette Oke. These were rough and tumble, edgy, almost obscene. Ye...