Sometimes, my faith lets me roll with what life presents to me. At my college teaching job yesterday, one of my students approached me at my desk in the middle of class as students were revising their work. It was clear he wanted to talk, and he didn’t need privacy. Several other students listened in on the conversation. He leaned down to look me in the eyes and calmly shared his anguish over a personal matter involving a child, a custody... Read more

My sojourn in the wilderness lasted forty years, from 1967, when I left the Episcopal Church, until 2007, when I wandered into a Catholic one. Many things tried to pull me apart during those years, and many meanwhile sustained me. One of the latter was the poetry of Walt Whitman, which I used to memorize and recite while out walking, striding along much as he did 150 years ago.I know, I know. Walt Whitman was both an egotist and a... Read more

Today my heart is heavy. I was daunted to discover over the weekend what happens when parents are too busy, too distracted, too “successful” to bother rearing their children. The details are immaterial, but the consequences are clear: some children whom I have known since they were in diapers have lost their innocence far too soon.I cling to my faith. After hearing Sunday’s homily about Saint Thomas the Apostle, I was planning to write about how Thomas’s doubt reminds us that... Read more

I’ll be 59 this summer, the last age at which I reasonably can say that I’m not an old man. You may say that 60 is the new 40, but if you ask my 20-ish daughters about 40, they’ll say it’s the age to start shopping for caskets. As a Catholic, though, I’ll be happy to be 60, happier still to be 70 and 80, if I’m even destined to get there. As long as I’m going to Mass every... Read more

I “met” Julie Cragon a few weeks ago when I stumbled onto her blog, Hand Me Down Heaven. She is a married mother of six and runs a large Catholic bookstore in Nashville, the same store her parents ran when she was in college. We talked about her writing a guest post for YIM Catholic. When she discovered after she’d  finished her post that I, too, had just written about Guardian Angels, Julie worried we’d have to postpone hers. To me, this... Read more

I used to think how lucky I was not to have been a Catholic early in this decade, as the abuse scandal was first coming to light in Boston. Only now, it’s worse, and I realize how shallow that so-called luck of mine is. Now, the daily, weekly drip, drip, drip of revelations—two months ago Ireland, last month Germany, yesterday Norway—is just exactly torture. And my Pope, about whom I have written so often with admiration, is right under the... Read more

Sometimes, I think of Catholics as a billion introverts. We Catholics are not known for proselytizing on street corners.We don’t tend to feature stereo speakers or percussion sections at our Masses. In general, our church bulletins are modest affairs featuring outdated fonts. Many practicing Catholics have rich interior lives but are tight-lipped about their beliefs. We tend to follow advice widely attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” So I was stunned to... Read more

I’m not sure. This might have been the first poem I ever loved. And it was a Catholic poem, 40 years before I became a Catholic. William Merriss was the English teacher of all English teachers at my junior high school, and he, though probably not a Catholic (I don’t know) taught me Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and, it turns out, a Jesuit. God bless Mr. Merriss. Pied BeautyGlory be to God for dappled things—For skies of couple-colour as... Read more