What Cordileone Should Have Said

June 7, 2015 By Max Lindenman

Last week, at a Sacra Liturgia conference in Manhattan, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone warned his audience that “gender ideology” threatens the foundation of the faith. To illustrate his point, he went on to list the “grand total” of 14 gender identities recognized by a major university, adding, “I’m sure even more will be invented as time goes on.” A parent at one Marin County’s Catholic schools objected, calling the archbishop’s statement “ill-considered, hurtful and lacking in knowledge and compassion.”... Read more

Jenner Dysphoria

June 3, 2015 By Max Lindenman

Caitlyn Jenner has more than two decades on me. Even so, when I look at that Vanity Fair cover, I feel ancient. Transgender, gender dysphoria, genderqueer, non-binary – all of these terms and the phenomena they describe are exotic to me. A few years ago, I suspect, they were still exotic to many of the people inside the media and out who are now handling them so deftly. When it comes to sexuality and gender, being a Catholic and de... Read more

Why I’m Still Catholic

June 2, 2015 By Max Lindenman

I was raised Freudian. My father was a psychoanalyst; my mother had, at various points in her life, been an analysand. To hear David Brooks-type pundits tell it, every kid who grew up since Constantinople fell to Mehmet the Conqueror was suckled on lollipops and self-esteem. If only. In our house, it was taken for granted that all of humanity blundered through life following disordered drives that only years of close professional scrutiny at $150 per hour could tame. Nobody... Read more

Conversions at the Phoenix Islamic Cultural Center

May 31, 2015 By Max Lindenman

When I first met Paul Griffin on Friday afternoon in front of Washington Park, during Jon Ritzheimer’s “Draw Muhammad” contest, he impressed me as a very big man with a very big voice and very strong opinions. (He also wore a very big hat — I wondered whether he’d mugged Curious George’s guardian for it.) To wit, Griffin was strongly in favor of the contest, which was then taking place, and the march on the Phoenix Islamic Cultural Center, which... Read more

Phoenix: Civilizations Clash at Twilight

May 30, 2015 By Max Lindenman

If you were up for some fun mischief – say, if you wanted to set off a whole bunch of M80s or tweak the nose of a major world religion – you couldn’t find a better place than the strip mall on 27th Avenue and I-17, in West Phoenix. Aside from a Denny’s and a Cinnabon, the place is lifeless. It is now 3:40 PM, and according to the latest update in the local news, the Denny’s will shut up... Read more

The Devil I Know

May 27, 2015 By Max Lindenman

The devil has been prowling around Patheos like a roaring lion. Yesterday, Simcha Fisher warned that CharlieCharliechallenge, the hot new kids’ party game, is a form of occult lite that could lead grade schoolers on a roundabout road to perdition precisely by appearing so harmless. Her point is that Satan likes a bargain. Getting your immortal soul will please him all the more if he doesn’t have to teach you to play bottleneck slide guitar in return. He’d rather you... Read more

Are We Ready for Our “Holocaust Literature” Yet?

May 25, 2015 By Max Lindenman

This past Saturday on Facebook, a friend of mine posted an e-mail forwarded her from a friend of hers who was working in a relatively safe part of the Middle East. The author of the original message – a man unknown both to my friend and her friend – claimed to be a Catholic aid worker stationed in an Iraqi city about to be overrun by the Islamic State. Among other things, the purported author claimed that IS terrorists were... Read more

A Palm for Romero, A Finger Wagged at the World

May 22, 2015 By Max Lindenman

The Church’s decision to beatify Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez as a martyr shows just how relevant it can keep itself by investing ancient words and concepts with new meanings. True to the popular understanding of martyrdom, the Salvadoran archbishop died a violent death. On March 24, 1980, an assassin belonging to a right-wing death squad shot Romero dead as he was celebrating Mass – revenge for his three-year pastoral campaign against the death squads’ kidnappings and murders. But, historically,... Read more

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: All out of Mercy?

May 21, 2015 By Max Lindenman

For me – and, I suspect, for many people – defense witnesses’ pleas for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s life made for a nauseating spectacle. Tsarnaev got the best America can offer – an education, a future, a wide circle of admiring friends. He threw it away to become a cold-blooded killer, a religious fanatic, and a living threat to détente between Muslims and, well, everybody else. So what if, as a toddler, he was so cute that his aunt let him pee... Read more

A Strange New Rosary

May 18, 2015 By Max Lindenman

A few years ago, a homeless woman named Karen began turning up in my apartment complex at intervals of a few months. Some mental illness had left her with the conviction that she was the illegitimate daughter of Robert Francis Kennedy. Though I can’t remember how Karen and I first found each other, she took a shine to me, eventually deciding that I was another of Bobby’s unacknowledged bastards. Growing up the son of an Irish-American Baby Boomer, I had... Read more