The prolific Catholic writer, EWTN personality, and notable public speaker Mike Aquilina is, I should admit now, a very good friend, but if I didn’t think highly of this book, I’d absent-mindedly forget to review it and look abashed and apologetic if he asked. Some of the poems in Terms and Conditions are amusing or funny — he really loves word play — some theological (St. Augustine and St. Gregory make appearances), but most, written for his wife Terri, charmingly but not sappily... Read more
The message I just sent to Land’s End, which is apparently sending out as a special “bonus” to loyal customers copies of the “men’s” magazine GQ. What the hell? What . . . the . . . hell? I get the mail this morning and find in it a copy of GQ with a mostly naked young woman on the cover, with the tiny little note on the mailing label that it’s a “bonus” from Land’s End. Not that this will get to... Read more
German men receive one in five of all those done in the world, and more than the total performed in the other nine countries in the top ten combined. Last year eight in every 100,000 German men had penoplasty, which is the surgical lengthening and expansion of the penis, reports the Daily Telegraph, in (I should warn you) a somewhat childishly smutty news story. The story will entertain Germanophobes. For others it may be a cautionary tale. The writer suggests one... Read more
“One can readily see,” writes George Washington professor Amitai Etzioni, perhaps most famous now for his “communitarian” writings, “why people hate to face a choice that has only two very devastating outcomes: Either allow terrorists to act with impunity by mixing in with the civilian population, or be forced to bomb homes from which terrorists launch their rockets.” Warning that Hezbollah has far more rockets hidden in homes and similar places in Lebanon than Hamas had in Gaza, which Israel... Read more
The year I wrote A Great & Glorious, but Debated, Assumption, that holy day of obligation for American Catholics was not a holy day of obligation, because feasts that are normally days of obligation are not obligatory when they fall on a Saturday or a Monday, apparently because someone thinks people shouldn’t have to go to church two days in a row. Which ignores the fact that obligations are only useful if they are, you know, obligatory, and not sometimes... Read more
God Texts the Ten Commandments, by James Quatro on McSweeney’s. Here are the first three: 1. no1 b4 me. srsly. 2. dnt wrshp pix/idols 3. no omg’s Read more
Catholics will be celebrating the Feast of the Assumption on Friday. Here, in case in the next week you happen to talk with an Evangelical friend who knows this and wants to know why you believe something unbiblical, worship Mary, don’t like Jesus, etc., is a hit-and-run “Mary 101” review of the dogma. It’s adapted from something I wrote for First Things‘ website a few years ago. The dogma is one to which our Protestant friends tend to react. Some assert only that it’s... Read more
Go here and read. Two young friends did the same thing this summer but sadly have not written up their experience. Fortunately Nick Malone, writing in the always interesting Fare Forward, has done so. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin for you his clever opening. Don’t read the caption to the picture. Read more
In his celebration of the ordination forty years ago of the first Episcopal women ministers, the Episopalian bishop of Europe claims that “Some past women saints reported feeling called to be priests,” a claim made with that drive-by vagueness I well remember from liberal writings I read when I was an Episcopalian. If anyone said this, whatever they said about wanting to be priests wasn’t what the bishop was suggesting they said, which is that they wanted something they thought they should, and that they had... Read more
In Obama the Light-Worker: Thoughts From 2008, I passed along the reflections of a Mark Morford, SF Gate and Huffington Post columnist, on then-candidate Obama as “rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” One of the commenters wondered what Morford thinks now, so I checked. I didn’t find any more amusing... Read more
David Mills
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