Especially useful for those of you who live in cities: Ever Wonder What To Say to a Homeless Person? It suggests five things to say and five not to say. The first list is especially useful and suggests some things most people won’t have thought of. Number two, for example: “Did you catch the game?” Athletic events are often shown on televisions in shelters. “Talking about sports can be one of the most interesting, neutralizing things,” says Robert Marbut, a homeless advocate... Read more
Various widely-reading friends have sent me lots of links to traditionalist Catholic articles on Pope Francis, which even over the last couple of weeks have gotten madder and madder (in both senses of the word), in the defense, so the writers always trumpet, of tradition and traditionalism. In them you see the peevish suspicion of anything Francis says or does; the assertion that anyone who reads him more favorably is naive or compromised; the childishly snickering nicknames, like “Pope Chatterbox”; the hanging... Read more
Appearing today on Aleteia, the first of my weekly columns for them: Single and Catholic. It begins: A single friend who recently moved posted a note on her Facebook page: “Was trying out a new church on Sunday when the pastor announced that his November sermon series would be about marriage. ‘And what if you’re not married?’ he asked us. ‘Well, Scripture says “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled.”’ Not the most welcoming... Read more
Advance notice for my friend Sally Thomas’s new collection of poems, Fallen Water. Here’s something from the publisher’s promotional message: Spoken endearments may be the best way to describe Sally Thomas’s poems. Throughout the book, she seeks to find the eternal in the ephemeral: ghosts of aunts and parents past, an infant buried in Holy Week, a daughter on her way somewhere, now past the security checkpoint, “shifting her backpack/With its mortal weight to her other shoulder.” These precisely written poems remind... Read more
“Get lost,” is basically what he said. Here’s a letter from the famous editor of the Washington Post to a pr flack who’d complained to him that the newspaper hadn’t run an article on his client. Bradlee says (third and fourth paragraphs): May I also tell you that you stress my credulity out of shape when you say that your motivation “is to secure a rightful place in the annals of journalism for a historic personality.” Whom are we talking about here? General... Read more
Not dispositive, as lawyers say, but suggestive, from The Atlantic: Asking drunk people in a study to answer the trolley and the footbridge problems (“In the first, people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others; the second asks about pushing someone off a bridge for the same purpose”), the researchers found a correlation between each subject’s level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the... Read more
“Pope Francis made a significant rhetorical break with Catholic tradition Monday by declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real,” announced MSBNC reporter Daniel Berger. He is, to excuse him a little, a “policy wonk” who covers politics and whose favorite tv shows are The Rachel Maddow Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and Morning Joe — but only a little because a reporter is honor-bound not to make claims when he has no idea what he’s talking... Read more
At his homily this morning at Santa Marta, Pope Francis, reports the CNA, “turned his reflection to the day’s first reading from Saint Paul, calling on Christians to be children of light, rather than children of darkness. In order to know which sort of children we are, the Pope said, we should consider whether the words we use fall into one of four categories: hypocritical, empty, frivolous, or obscene.” Here’s the text of that part of the homily from Vatican radio: Are our... Read more
A small contribution to understanding one of the ecclesial communities, which may look more like the Catholic Church than the others but is farther away from it in teaching. A few friends in an email conversation have been batting around the idea that mainstream Episcopalianism is, despite its embrace of moral innovations, “credally orthodox,” which is to say, basically okay. The idea that mainstream Episcopalianism cares for “credal orthodoxy” is perhaps charitable but also wrong (and therefore actually uncharitable). This is a... Read more
“The media has largely viewed the email scandal through this lens,” writes Brandon McGinley of the scandal of men who worked in the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office sending pornography around by email. “The real outrage we are told, is the use of taxpayer resources for personal entertainment,” he writes. . . . The idea seems to be that if a state department chief hosted a fantasy football draft on state computers and state time, the scandal would be in... Read more
David Mills
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