Several weeks after 9/11, my friend and I went skydiving for the first and only time in our lives. As it happened, the airstrip was about 30 miles southeast of Phoenix, on a brown, scrubby patch of desert within sight of some half-dozen gnarled buttes. Give or take 15,000 feet, it could have been Afghanistan — at least to people who, like the two of us, knew the country only from the occasional wide-angle shot on CNN. Neither of us... Read more
Of all the Church’s dubious pious traditions, my favorite is the story of the Veronica Veil. According to the Acts of Pilate, while Jesus was being goaded and driven to Calvary, under the weight of His Cross, a woman stepped forward and mopped His face with her veil. Miraculously, the face’s image was transferred to the fabric. She later brought the veil to Rome, where it cured the Emperor Tiberias. The name “Veronica,” which appears in the text, is a... Read more
If you’re a refugee, preparing to be deported from the Netherlands, you can become a game-show star. The show, called “Weg van Nederlands,” which can translate either to “Away from the Netherlands” or “Crazy from the Netherlands,” offers panels of five soon-to-be deportees a competitive arena in which to prove how well they’ve assimilated into Dutch society. According to Salon, contests involve “answering questions about tulips and bikes, identifying corny local pop tunes and carving an outline of the country’s... Read more
Really, I have no longstanding grudge against Texas, the soil that yielded Buddy Holly, Larry McMurtry and (I assume) Texas toast, and which received Pee Wee Herman so hospitably during his big adventure. It’s true, for about fifteen years, I had a Texas-born stepmother, whom one of my father’s friends properly calls “cold as a brass jock strap.” But she spoke French, and ended up writing an object-relations biography of Flaubert, so I assume the harpy no longer counts. For... Read more
From a writer’s point of view, the only good thing about the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center is that it’s no harder a subject than the ninth anniversary, or for that matter, the fifth. As long as 9/11 remains within living memory, it should beggar the imagination. It’s awful, it’s epochal. Despite bin Laden’s death, it still feels unavenged. All sorts of ccontroversies, from crackpot theories on whodunnit, to analyses of what should... Read more
Maya Angelou has told the world, through the Washington Post, that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looks “like an arrogant twit,” in his 30-foot high statue that stands on Washington’s National Mall. Angelou blames the condensed quote at the base — “I was a drum major for peace, justice and righteousness” — but the problems are far more extensive. In life, King generally wore a mild, reflective expression. In marble, he’s scowling like Ozymandias, arms folded across his... Read more
Having read the signs of the times, Antonio Celso de Queiros, bishop emeritus of Catanduva in Brazil, thinks the Church could be ready for yet another Vatican council. As he sees it, Catholics today are feeling the same mixture of “perplexity and hope” that characterized the Church in the waning days of Pius XII’s pontificate. Specifically, they’re both perplexed and hopeful regarding the Church’s ability to address the following problems: – Christians have abandoned the practice of faith and don’t... Read more
For a long time, critics were in the habit of complaining that American authors had given up trying to write the Great American Novel. That is, they’d stopped trying to create plots and characters that embodied social trends with wide-ranging significance. In Balsamic Dreams, Joe Queenan writes: “Baby Boomer literati absolutely refused to go for the brass ring. Instead, they retreated into their gender, their ethnic group, their sexual demographic group, or their own individual selves.” In “The Judgment of... Read more
This week, via video, an America Magazine commentator plugs Fr. Roy Shelly’s formula for a good sermon. It should take up no more than eight minutes, and have a point condensable to a single sentence on an index card. I’m sure there’s plenty of merit in that, but still the idea tends to put my back up. I hate the very idea of reducing anything to an assembly-line process. Berry Gordy tried this with pop music, and it made him... Read more
Something there is that doesn’t love a hiker. Specifically, there seems to be something about the Americans imprisoned for espionage after straying into Iran during a 2009 hike through Iraqi Kurdistan that really sets people’s teeth on edge. Karen Leigh reports in the Atlantic, “hatred has gone viral on the internet” since the news leaked out that two of them — Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer — have received eight-year sentences. (A third, Sarah Shourd, released on a $500,000 bond,... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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