“As television has long been a pivotal platform for addressing controversial issues, it has engendered and reflected the strides made towards LGBT equality,” begins a Paley Center press release for their 2014 gala “celebrating television’s impact on LGBT equality,” says the announcement on their website. The president and ceo of the Paley Center, Maureen Reddy, told Xfinity’s tv blog that For over six decades, television’s depictions of the LGBT community have helped to change the country’s perceptions and increase its... Read more

Cheers for Father Larry Richards, who wrote on his Facebook page in October: If you are one of those who will not love and respect our Holy Father because he does not think like you please unfriend yourself from my page. I do not want to continue to read the slander of people who call themselves Catholic and spit on the Chair of Peter. As the saints have said ‘Where there is Peter there is the Church.’ You do not have to... Read more

From The New Republic‘s story on the once infamous fiction-writer Steven Glass: “Steve Glass now lives in Venice Beach with his longtime girlfriend, Julie Hilden, a dog, two cats, and a rotating cast of foster pets. (The couple are also virgins.)” The last word was, alas, “vegans.” The story, by one of the colleagues Glass betrayed, is fascinating. Read more

My latest column for Aleteia. It begins: “I wouldn’t go to church with my plumber.” The speaker, dressed in a dark two-piece suit, with the aggressive pin-stripes favored by some businessmen, went to a traditionalist Episcopal parish out on Long Island where the average income sails far over the average American’s. I laughed, because I’d heard that line said as part of a joke, and then saw that he was serious. It was an awkward moment. I understand snobbery. Everyone... Read more

In Mother Jones, Michael Pollan explains What’s Wrong With the Paleo Diet. He argues, essentially, that civilizations cook for good reason. For example, the fourth of his five points (this is the reporter’s summary, not Pollan writing): 4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway). There’s paleo, and then there’s the raw diet. Folks who eat raw tout the health benefits of the approach, saying that they’re accessing the full, complete nutrients available because they’re not heating, and thus... Read more

An accurate list of Ten Things Not to Say to a Convert, by Abby Johnson. This one, for example: “Isn’t sex just so much better as a Catholic???” said with much enthusiasm Years ago I head that one. From women. And this one: “Life is so much better as a Catholic.” About which Johnson writes: Okay, let’s try not go all “prosperity gospel” on new Catholics. Life is great as a Catholic. I can receive the real Body and Blood of... Read more

The philosopher Rachel Lu responds to my Promiscuity Pays with an article on the blessings of her life and the need for virtue to rightly enjoy those blessings. After describing an enjoyable day with her family, she writes in The Virtuous Life Is the Good Life: I marvel that, in the world as we now know it, this can be a fairly normal day, in the life of a fairly normal person. I don’t think I’m too naïve about the modern... Read more