A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven
My lady friend’s family has been combing through my blog for evidence I’m a loser. Thanks to my edgy but disarming confessional style, the task presents about as great a challenge as combing the blogosphere for mentions of Jeremy Lin. If I had any sense, I’d beguile them with false intel — say, by blogging [...]
Yesterday, Rick Santorum defended the honor of women contraceptive-users everywhere…sort of. During a debate in Congress on the Obama administration’s mandated contraceptive coverage, Santorum backer Foster Friess told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception,” he said. “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t [...]
In Slate, Julia Feisenthal tries heroically to crack the code of Rick Santorum’s sweater vest. She’s convinced it must mean something — the problem is, she can’t settle on a single meaning. The polysemiotic garment, Feisenthal writes, “lies at the intersection of practicality…and frivolity… The look is both boyish and grandfatherly, sporty and fusty, conservative [...]
When I was an undergrad, I sometimes chanced to meet up in the Student Recreation Complex weight room with a kid named Raul. Raul suffered from what I now realize was Tourette’s syndrome, snorting and jerking his head in mid-sentence before going on to complete his thoughts. Spotting him on the bench or military press [...]
The international rumor mill has it that Fidel Castro — El Jefe, El Commandante, or El Barbudo, to those who know him best — will be returning to the Catholic fold during Pope Benedict’s upcoming visit to Cuba. According to a post on GetReligion.org, the “anti-clerical” Italian paper La Republicca is claiming Castro has “turned [...]
There’s a strange symmetry between British singer M.I.A. and pro-life activist Randall Terry. Both have dedicated their careers, to one degree or another, to raising awareness of genocide. In her songs and videos, M.I.A. (born Maya Arulpragasam) refers to the repression of her people, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, at the hands of the nation’s Sinhalese [...]
When it comes to football and its risks, writes Ken Briggs in National Catholic Reporter, Catholic scholars may be caught in a spiral of silence. Briggs finds that a sampling of these scholars, while believing “the medical hazards exposed by the research raise serious questions” about the wisdom of continuing the game, has chosen to [...]
I totally spaced my patron saint’s feast day. Indeed, I might have gone all day without being any the wiser, but some friends posted clues to my Facebook wall. One, a video commemorating the fourth centennary of the founding of the Order of the Visitation, just made me go, “Mm. Very nice for the, er, [...]
Maybe I should make like Mark Wahlberg (whose brother, Donnie, I was said in happier times to resemble) and mark the end of my youth by getting my tattoos lasered away. But — nah. They’re not hurting anyone. At least one of them, a cross formed by the title of Pushkin’s poem “Ne dai mne, [...]
Joanne McPortland is one of those very rare, too-modest writers who deserves to be read more than she actually wants to be read. For the sake of Catholic letters’ good name, I am going to drag her, kicking and screaming, into my own small sliver of the limelight. By the age of 60, Joanne’s made [...]
James Dobson, scourge of Spongebob and the Teletubbies, has found a live target. Speaking this weekend at a conference in Texas, he condemned Callista Gingrich as “a mistress for eight years.” Karen Santorum, who “set aside two professional careers to raise those seven children,” he said, would “make a fabulous first lady role model.” Dobson’s [...]
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