When you go to the Sistine Chapel with Sophia Loren, it can be quite some time before your thoughts turn to the ceiling.
I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church, went to private school in that church, went to chapel every day.
I'd been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2017 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Speaking live on television is one thing... speaking to 30,000 people in a football stadium is another.
I graduated from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with degrees in journalism and Spanish in 2001 and landed my first on-air job in Charlottesville, Va.
When you're at home for Duke-Carolina, you have a crowd of close to 10,000 around you, loving you. That's awesome. But it's also a lot of fun in Chapel Hill, where it's you, your teammates and your coaches, and no one else. I enjoyed the games at Chapel Hill a little more because of that.
Every night, half an hour before curtain up, the bells of St. Malachy's, the Actors' Chapel on New York's 49th Street, peal the tune of 'There's No Business Like Show Business.' If you walk the streets of the theatre district before a show and see the vast, enthusiastic lines it sounds like a calling: there is certainly no place like Broadway.
I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.