Amoris Laetitia and the Family Road Trip
A confession: I’m in no hurry to get through Amoris Laetitia. Two hundred, sixty-four pages is a lot of Pope Francis to dive into all eagerski-beaverski and heedless-like. The first two chapters,...
View ArticleFor Veterans’ Day: Reflections on the Field-Hospital Church
A few years ago, Monsignor Charles Pope wrote a short essay defending the use of martial imagery in hymns and homilies. If tradition carries any weight, the case for is a slam-dunk – or, as the old...
View ArticleGeneration Win: LGBT-Rights Supporters and Those Mad Enough to Resist Them
We’re living in a world where jocks use words like “relational” – and come to no profit by it. Two days ago in Slate, Mark Joseph Stern gloated over the role of New York Met Daniel Murphy’s fourth-game...
View ArticleLessons from A Modern Family of Introverts
When I say I have no social skills, I mean I lack the flexibility to take part in the Kadesh Operations – the ad hoc alliances, the raids and counter-raids — involved in carving out and holding a place...
View ArticleOn Abstaining from Communion
The other week at Mass, I remained in the pew when everyone else got up for Communion. I can’t remember whether I was praying fervently or daydreaming or nodding halfway off — the difference is...
View ArticleCaught up (A Little) in the Francis Effect
A number of readers have offered negative feedback on my last piece. One was my mother, with whom I Skyped yesterday. “I can’t believe you wrote something bad about the pope!” She cried. “Warn me the...
View ArticleImmune to the Francis Effect
Looking back over this past weekend, I’m not sure whether I can pinpoint the exact moment when I was completely and irreversibly Francis’d out. But that moment did come, and once it came there was no...
View ArticleContra Bill Maher
Try as I might, I just can’t dislike Bill Maher, probably because we represent the same unlikely mixing of the tribes. Normally, here in the American melting pot, Jews marry Italians, and the Irish...
View Article“His Holiness and Hizzoner”— Pope Francis and the Ghost of Ed Koch
Dear Blahblah You are an insufferable old bat. I don’t give a tuppeny damn what you think Dorothy Day would have done in my position because, number one, I ain’t her, and number two, you wouldn’t know...
View ArticlePope Francis and the Barbarians
Eager to glimpse the big picture of Francis’ pontificate? Frustrated connecting the dots from soundbyte to soundbyte? Read Constantine Cafavy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which Rod Dreher was...
View ArticlePope Francis, Refugees, and the Big Levitical Beach Party
What irks me most about the guy is his grin, which is roguish, the mark of a born schmoozer. In my world, if you’re a Somali refugee and you want me to give you a cigarette or buy you something from...
View ArticleKim Davis: Conversion and Confusion
Whether or not you think Kim Davis, clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is right or prudent to step into St. Thomas More’s shoes by ordering her deputies to deny marriage certificates to gay couples, she...
View ArticleMargie Winters: The Making of A Rebel
When I first read the story of how Waldron Mercy fired Margie Winters, a lesbian married to another woman, from her post as head of religious education, I argued that she’d been treated shabbily, and...
View ArticleThe Not-So-Simple Faithful
How do you welcome someone who’s convinced he holds the deed to your house? That’s the question I’d put to Pope Francis. Or maybe I should say the latest question. Addressing an enormous crowd in...
View ArticlePope Francis and the Mommy Trap
The Holy Father is all about mothers. In Ecuador, he warned of a “mother wound,” which threatens to leave children too emotionally crippled to give and receive love. According to the pope, everyone...
View ArticleThe Rising Cost of Price Tagging
Last Thursday, after arson damaged the administrative buildings of the historic Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and fishes at Taghba, in Israel’s Galilee region, Israeli Interior Minister Silvan...
View ArticleMy Father, the Card
It is really something special to see a PhD holder and leading light of Manhattan’s overcrowded mental health care field with carmelized apple spilling from his nose like water from a gargoyle’s mouth....
View ArticleNew Arab Saints: A Fountain of Virtue to the Thirsty
The careful reader will note something forlorn in the words “Pope Francis presided over the canonizations…before a congregation of tens of thousands of people.” Josemaria Escriva’s canonization drew a...
View ArticleMike Huckabee, Pope Francis, and the Rise of Mother Manners
It seems a terrible waste in a man whose name is basically a dirty limerick waiting to be written, but Mike Huckabee frowns on cussing. On an Iowa radio program, after assuring listeners that “In the...
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