Millennial Misery

Last updated on: January 4, 2014 at 2:00 pm By Marc

These are odd days. In 5 minutes I may come to know your appearance, birthdate, hometown, interests, likes and dislikes, favorite movies, recent thoughts, friends, family, acquaintances, occupations, and relationship status — all without ever encountering you. These are delightful days wherein an Internet connection enables me and millions to observe a stranger’s genitalia, days I may know the intimate details of another person to the point of their nakedness — and never know them. I have 500 Facebook friends... Read more

Drawing Stuff on the Pope’s Face

Last updated on: December 26, 2013 at 5:43 pm By Marc

What is really remarkable about Pope Francis is his unremarkable, by-the-books Catholicism — for his is an odd religion with remarkable books to live by. The world rightly raves about the rumors that their Pope is sneaking out of the Vatican to feed the poor, but to the Catholic with the balls to read what his Church demands, these are acts of radical obedience, not radical discontinuity. The Church sayeth: God blesses those who come to the aid of the... Read more

Gratitude as Felt Poverty

Last updated on: December 21, 2013 at 3:15 pm By Marc

Gratitude responds to gift. Consider our experience of the thing in its most obvious, most burning and urgent form, when we are acutely aware that we have nothing to offer the gift-giver but our thanks. How hard we feel this in the face of love, full of the wonderful, painful knowledge that there is nothing we could do or say to christen us its worthy candidates, no words or gestures to serve as love’s equalizing response — and yet we... Read more

What We’re Doing In Steubenville

Last updated on: December 20, 2013 at 12:47 pm By Marc

Over the summer, my friend Joseph Antoniello and I on a porch in Steubenville, Ohio discussed — as only sleep-deprived undergraduate philosophy students can discuss — the radical nature of action, the terrible possibility of doing something, the near-infinite apathy of our age and our selves, and the Herculean effort it takes to shrug the malaise of just-letting-things-happen in order to act. We were both reading the texts of Karol Wojtyla… …who argues it is precisely in action that the person... Read more

Presence as Absence

Last updated on: December 13, 2013 at 5:58 pm By Marc

The absence of people we love isn’t absence at all. For absence is just that — nothingness, a lack, the not-being-there of a particular person. If this is what we felt in the gone-awayness of our loved ones, than the phenomenon of missing them would not exist. Would we experience their absence as just that — absence, nothing at all, experienced as I currently experience the absence of Costa Rica, as simply not there for me. The absence of the... Read more

The Oh Hello’s

Last updated on: December 11, 2013 at 10:06 pm By Marc

There’s a band I want to assume things of, oversimplify, and generally deliver as something far less than listening to their art would ever do: The Oh Hello’s, may they live long enough to change the world and short enough to resist the temptation towards solo projects. But before speaking of them, we will of Walker Percy, that unfailingly dark and usually drunk Catholic novelist who says through his character Binx Bolling, in The Moviegoer, “To become aware of the possibility... Read more

The Auschwitz Conflation

Last updated on: November 14, 2013 at 10:39 am By Marc

When I argued that the use of images of aborted people to protest abortion indicates our unintentional relation to these people as things, I received in response an inevitable comparison to the images of Jews who were killed at Auschwitz. I suppose this is worth addressing, given that its the only argument I ever hear in favor of the dead-become-signs, and that on the surface, it seems like a reasonable comparison. Both abortion and concentration camps are moral atrocities that... Read more

Unintentional Fetal Depersonalization

Last updated on: November 11, 2013 at 1:46 pm By Marc

To tell the truth poorly is to make a mockery of it, even if you’re right. – Sam Rocha It is a self-proclaimed aim of the pro-life movement that the world recognize the unborn child as an unique life and a particular personality — and subsequently not kill him. Simple request, really, this not-killing-people business. Those supporting the conservation of abortion have yet to articulate a successful evasion of our ethical demand, though from what I understand, they’re working on... Read more

Repentance as Time Travel

Last updated on: November 8, 2013 at 4:03 pm By Marc

Part 3 of a series beginning to see the light of day. Summary of Part 1: If we desire our lives to be meaningful, we must be rid of sin, for sin is that-which-ought-not-be, and no meaning can be riddled with that-which-ought-not-be and remain consistent meaning, as no story can contain absurdities that contradict the entire story while remaining a good story. Summary of Part 2: If our sins were merely concrete moments in an unreachable past, we’d all be... Read more

The Ethical Necessity of Time Travel

Last updated on: May 31, 2014 at 11:54 am By Marc

Part 2 of a series hardly worth talking about. Sin is not religious. It is a theistic-atheistic, equal-opportunity steel-boot to the groin the entirety of humanity is doubled-over and groaning with. To be a sinner is not simply to have offended some brooding moral order which thereafter holds you in cosmic contempt. To be a sinner is to contain within yourself the reality of having done what you ought not have done. There is hardly a human alive — no... Read more