For all I know, Catholic social critics would do away with adolescence and young adulthood altogether. You know, keep it simple — when kids turn 12, pack the boys off to sea as powder monkeys and marry the girls off to moneylenders or estate bailiffs with wattles and gout. But, as of this writing, the Catholic blogosphere does have a YA market, and Marc Barnes, an undergrad who blogs as Bad Catholic, has pretty much cornered it. Yesterday, for challenging... Read more
To the guard patrolling the big parking lot at Tempe Marketplace on the night before Thanksgiving, I must have seemed less Rosa Parks than Ignatius J. Reilly. When he spotted me from his golf cart at the beginning of his circuit, I was sitting on the bench outside Pier One Imports; by the time he finished, I hadn’t moved. It was getting late, the place was soon to shut down, and there was no bag by my feet bearing the... Read more
The Pope’s on Twitter. The secular press is running profiles of Catholic bloggers. It’s starting to look like the new media have been baptized, confirmed, and maybe even canonized. (Isidore of Seville serves as patron saint of the Internet, at least while Elizabeth Scalia’s above ground.) Before all this aggiornamento gives the Church a bad case of agita, I’d like to make a pitch for Skype. With 663 million registered users worldwide, the voice-over protocol, which enables users to communicate... Read more
The worst thing about being robbed by crystal meth addicts is having to walk them through the robbery. They’re jumpy and scatterbrained, tweakers are. You’ve got to talk to them as you’d talk to five-year-olds. Unless you explain, “Here’s my WALLET. Here’s my CELL PHONE. Here’s this OTHER CELL PHONE that hasn’t worked since I knocked it into the toilet, but which I’m carrying around like a lock of hair from a dead lover’s head because the cheapskates at T-Mobile... Read more
So I check Facebook this morning and see that Joanne McPortland has posted a link. I click it and discover she’s written a piece listing all the people who’ve distinguished themselves as guides and fellow travelers on her faith journey. Just for a joke, I checked for my name; like a perfect punch line, there it was! Joanne writes: Max Lindenman (standing for all my Patheos Catholic Channel peeps). Max’s blog helped draw me back into the Church with the... Read more
One afternoon, when I was 14 and visiting Paris with my mother and her boyfriend, Bob, we stopped to picnic. I forget exactly where we were and what kind of cheese we ate. Here’s what I do remember: after we’d finished up, my mom reached into a white paper bag and handed each of us a madeleine. “We shall eat these,” she announced, “in honor of Proust.” I took hold of the spongy thing, gave it a little pinch, and... Read more
If Susan Pevensie from the Chronicles of Narnia were a real person (or if I were a fictional one), we’d probably have ended up together, at least for a while. I can see us now: zipping through London on my Lambretta, gobbling leapers and thrashing rockers to a soundtrack by the Who, until Profumo got hold of her number. For those who don’t know their Narnia books, Susan is the only character in C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume Christian allegory who backslides.... Read more
A priest I used to know hated St. Francis bird baths. He was Italian-American; judging by his stature and complexion, his ancestors hailed from one of those places south of Naples that the American popular imagination was once quick to associate with malaria and the mob. His rejection of Franciscan kitsch, then, might have formed part of a stereotype-bucking campaign, rather like the one an African-American woman of my acquaintance undertook by cultivating a taste for the GOP and Jack... Read more
Over the past week, I’ve produced one current-events analysis of just over 1,000 words, and two personal essays, each running about 2,000 words. I found the personal essays much more enjoyable to write. For me, the fun of writing comes from turning a nifty phrase, thinking up an apt simile, using words to paint an eye-grabbing but intelligble picture. This is easiest to do when I happen to know the subject matter inside-out, and I’m afraid I know my own... Read more
When the Cairo embassy’s statement condemning the film Innocence of Islam was mis-attributed to President Obama and mistakenly reported as a response to the murder of diplomats at the Benghazi consulate, Obama reacted in a commonsensical way. “It came from people on the ground who are potentially in danger,” he said. “And my tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack when they’re in that circumstance, rather than try to question their judgment from the comfort of a... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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