I want to talk about the relationship between gender and "essential" masculinity/femininity, but before I get to that I need to lay a little groundwork in the form of a brief introduction to one of my favourite postmodern thinkers: Jean Baudrillard. Read more
Pope Francis has arrived in America, and of course the internet is awash with the complaints of my fellow Catholics. What, precisely, the problems are varies from person to person, but the bottom line is this: in one way or another, the Pope just isn't being Catholic enough. Read more
When someone converts to Catholicism, they will always bring with them certain habits of thought that they've learned from whatever background they happen to have come from. Read more
Trigger warning: This post contains jokes. Read more
I am legit way too tired to produce a real post with, like, content. So I provide for your amusement and edification, an introduction to my husband. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Yes. It is a real snake. Read more
I’m reading Rachel Lu’s essay critiquing Spiritual Friendship in Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction. I have a lot to say about it – first that it’s much more articulate and well-argued than most of the criticism that I’ve read of our “movement” such as it is. But more importantly, because it is more articulate it’s actually possible to figure out what seems to be the bottom line. And it’s a massive misunderstanding. Lu writes, “it’s... Read more
I honestly hoped that I would never have to write ever again about the question of whether a faithful homosexual, bisexual or gender-atypical Catholic can use LGBTQ identity language but apparently this is one of those questions that just isn’t going away. I’m Catholic. I’m married – that is, I am in a Church sanctioned marriage to a person of the opposite sex. I’m pregnant with my 7th child. I take Catholic sexual teaching pretty bloody seriously. But I’m queer,... Read more
By now, we've probably all seen the tragic photographs of 3 yr old Aylan Kurdi laying dead on a Turkish beach. There have been a few posts up around the internet sharing the photographs with a certain amount of very black gallows humour "Finally, a poster-child for Syria's refugees." Read more
One of my favourite things about being a Catholic writer is doing book reviews. Basically, it means that people send me free books. I just got a crop of them today, and a few of them look like they're going to be bloggable as well as reviewable. Read more
Most people, when they think of boardgames, will summon to mind a couple of fairly lame games: Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, Life. If that's your experience of tabletop games, I totally understand that you don't play them. Read more
Catholic Authenticity
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