This is the third part in my “Things I Learned From My Characters” series. Catullus is an artist. He’s openly gay, and a closet Catholic. These are his opinions. I should make it clear, for those of you who think that it would be fun, that if you leave comments for my characters they will in fact answer them and dialogue as themselves. Check out the wisdom that Juvenal and Germanicus have to offer if you haven’t already. All Philosophies... Read more
A terrible thing happened in Orlando last night. I’m sure most of you already know; it’s the worst mass shooting in US history, with 50 people dead and many more wounded. And it was an attack against a gay bar. As of the point of writing, it’s not known whether the LGBTQ community was being specifically targeted, or whether he was just looking for a place where there would be a lot of people and it happened to be this... Read more
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the internet about the Stanford rapist – stuff from feminists, stuff from men anxious to distance themselves from feminist ire, stuff from fellow Catholics who are angry at the lack of justice. One of the things that I see come up again and again is a sentiment along these lines: “a normal, decent male who doesn’t want to rape when he’s sober will not suddenly turn into a rapist when he is... Read more
My usual habit when reading Vatican documents is to blaze through the first couple chapters, or sometimes the entire document, in a single sitting. If I don’t get to the end the first time out, the chances that I’ll ever finish it are slight. Instead, I do exactly what most people do (that is, most people who bother reading primary source Church documents in the first place): I look up the bits that relate to my favourite issues, read a... Read more
Gaslighting is one of those terms that I see cropping up occasionally on the internet, but until yesterday I had only a very vague notion of what it meant. (By vague, I mean I knew it was something that women who were stalked or abused often complained about, but that was it.) So I finally decided that I actually wanted to know what it meant and I looked it up. As I read through several articles, a slow sense of... Read more
I’m doing a series of posts in which I give some of the most useful things that I’ve learned from each of the characters in Eros & Thanatos. (I explain the project in a little more detail in yesterday’s post.) Today’s character is Germanicus. He’s a Stoic. You’ll probably get that from what he has to say below. (1) Stoics Have More Fun – Most people think of stoicism as a pretty dour philosophy. Suffering comes at you, you grit... Read more
One of the great joys of being an author is you get to stand outside of yourself – to see other people’s worldviews through their own eyes. It also means that you end up learning how to see what’s good and useful in philosophies that are very different from your own. Over the next couple of days, for fun, I’m going to present a series of pithy little life lessons that I’ve learned from my characters. Some of them are... Read more
Yesterday, I talked about the failure of the pro-life movement in upholding the sanctity of life after birth. Today, I want to talk about the other side of the problem: how the social justice movement betrays the poor. I’ll start with a story, set in a dystopian near-future world that is more or less exactly the same as the world is now. It concerns a woman, we’ll call her Lisa. She has three children, and she’s desperately poor. She works,... Read more
It’s been some time since I was actively involved in the pro-life movement. The workload involved in being open to life myself doesn’t leave me free to do the things I used to. I do, however, care tremendously for the rights of the unborn – which is why the state of the pro-life movement continues to concern me. It concerns me, especially, that there seems to have become a deep and problematic disconnect between the two “sides” of the movement.... Read more
So the sad part of the story is that my ducks from last year mysteriously disappeared during hunting season after we heard a bunch of shots down by the pond in the morning. Ahem. So this year we’ve decided to go with a new variety that don’t look anything like mallards. Also, we’re going to bring them in before hunting season starts. Photography courtesy of Solomon Selmys, used with permission. Read more
Catholic Authenticity
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