A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven
I don’t have my copy of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night on my lap. A few years ago, I loaned it to someone who took it with her when she drifted out of my life. But among the sections that have stuck in my head, more or less intact, is one where Mailer digresses [...]
In the film adaptation of Herman Wouk’s World War Two novel, The Caine Mutiny, there’s a scene where three officers of a high-functioning but very messy minesweeper report aboard Admiral Halsey’s flagship. Their mission is to denounce their Captain Queeg as an incompetent paranoiac. But as soon as they reach the admiral’s hatch, the theme [...]
This Sunday, I’m attending a Latin Mass. There, it’s decided. I could hardly call myself a flâneur of Catholic culture otherwise. Never having taken a knee at the Porziuncola or the Holy Sepulchre, never having set so much as a single toe on the Camino — all these omissions, I think, are forgivable, given budgetary [...]
Readers: When I wrote this piece, all the news I’d received on Jennifer Fulwiler’s condition had been encouraging. For that reason, I gave myself leave to take a detour from the ongoing drama of her illness to broader questions of how social media affect the way people interact. However, since then, I’ve learned she’s taken [...]
With the death-smell filling his nostrils, and Acantha’s heartsick whine still filling his ears, Melampus found it urgent to distract himself. Now that the strange aroma had withdrawn to the very limits of his tracking powers, he discovered he was able, for the first time, to puzzle over its source. Oils, incense, and milk: do [...]
“Slow and steady wins the race,” Aesop wrote. So often had Melampus heard the words quoted in reference to himself that he’d adopted them as his personal motto. In the first weeks of his journey, he seemed, once again, to be proving the wisdom behind them. The delightful bouquet beckoned due south; after a night [...]
Historians trace the basset hound back to the pack raised by St. Hubert of Liège, who was an avid huntsman. But even forefathers have forefathers. If you’re willing to put your trust in folklore, then the breed’s remotest ancestor — what Wotan was to the Germanic tribes and Oghuz Khan to the Turks — was [...]
Yoking modern technology and oogedy-boogedy devotional practice, the website for the santuario in Nettuno, Italy, invites visitors to e-mail requests for intercession addressed to St. Maria Goretti. Every day, whoever’s in charge prints out the requests and stacks them in a corner of the urn where the saint’s wax-covered bones are on display. Whether the [...]
I wasn’t home when news of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School first hit the online media. I made some effort to catch up, but after about 20 minutes, it seemed pointless. There’s a depressing sameness to these shootings. The shooter’s almost always a man in his teens or 20s with a history [...]
To the guard patrolling the big parking lot at Tempe Marketplace on the night before Thanksgiving, I must have seemed less Rosa Parks than Ignatius J. Reilly. When he spotted me from his golf cart at the beginning of his circuit, I was sitting on the bench outside Pier One Imports; by the time he [...]
The Pope’s on Twitter. The secular press is running profiles of Catholic bloggers. It’s starting to look like the new media have been baptized, confirmed, and maybe even canonized. (Isidore of Seville serves as patron saint of the Internet, at least while Elizabeth Scalia’s above ground.) Before all this aggiornamento gives the Church a bad [...]
The worst thing about being robbed by crystal meth addicts is having to walk them through the robbery. They’re jumpy and scatterbrained, tweakers are. You’ve got to talk to them as you’d talk to five-year-olds. Unless you explain, “Here’s my WALLET. Here’s my CELL PHONE. Here’s this OTHER CELL PHONE that hasn’t worked since I [...]
So I check Facebook this morning and see that Joanne McPortland has posted a link. I click it and discover she’s written a piece listing all the people who’ve distinguished themselves as guides and fellow travelers on her faith journey. Just for a joke, I checked for my name; like a perfect punch line, there [...]
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