Tell me more, tell me more Was it love at first sight? Not hardly. And that my latest theological crush happened at all is pretty miraculous. I still have enough vestigial Cathar in me, left over from my flirtation with Gnosticism, to be amazed and slightly horrified that a Dominican could steal even a piece of my heart.They’re all alike, those Dogs of God, the Nurse to my inner Juliet sneers. Burn you and leave you. But here I am... Read more

If it weren’t for logic, I’d be a lawyer now–or so I tell myself. When I took the LSAT in 2003, I aced everything but the Logic Problems section, where I tanked utterly. (Not hard to do. The problem with logic problems is that they’re the Jenga of testing. Get one detail wrong–put Mr Green behind the wheel of the red car, say, instead of on the yellow motorcycle–and the whole thing comes crashing down.) There went my full ride... Read more

In his homily at Vespers on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul today, in the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura (St Paul Outside the Walls), Pope Benedict XVI also found the love story at the heart of conversion, and made it big enough to encircle all Christians on this last day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: While experiencing these days the painful situation of our divisions, we Christians can and must look to... Read more

Every heart, every heart to love will come but like a refugee. ~ Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”   In the Church calendar, today is the day we commemorate the Conversion of St Paul. But we might as well call it Valentines Day–because every conversion (or reversion, for that matter) is a falling in love of sorts. As recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s conversion from Saul the Christian-hunter to Paul the Christ-hunted involves a literal fall, a bolt from... Read more

The baptismal font in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, made from an inverted porphyry  sarcophagus lid. Nice symbolism there. It’s my baptismal day, or so I’m figuring. Thanks to the promptings of the Spirit and the pushes and shoves and support of the best bunch of sponsors and godparents an initiate could hope for–Max Lindenman, Frank Weathers, and The Anchoress Elizabeth Scalia–I’m jumping into the pool and coming up a neophyte Catholic blogger, no longer just an opinionated inquirer hanging... Read more

Bernini’s elephant base for the obelisk in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome Having struggled through yesterday’s post, I went to Mass today prepared to be more open to an expected pro-life message than I was last year on this Roe v. Wade anniversary weekend. I vowed to acknowledge the elephant in the pew. I just didn’t think I would be the elephant. To be fair, my parish is not known for a particularly strong... Read more

In the tangled journey home of this particular returning Catholic, this is one of the toughest times of the year. Tomorrow marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Roe v. Wade, and everybody I know is–literally or figuratively–on the bus to Washington for the annual March for Life. Most of the Catholics I know and love are on the bus in support of the march and in passionate protest of the right to legalized abortion that Roe established. Most... Read more

It’s the Eve of St. Agnes, and it’s cold. Cold as the beginning of Keats’ long lyric poem, set on and named for this night: St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in the wooly fold . . . If you were a young unmarried European woman on this night, in times past, you’d be preparing yourself like... Read more

I thought I was going to squeeze out a win for Team Non-Beauty when I saw, at Slate, that The Explainer’s 2011 Question of the Year turned out to be Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly? Woohoo! I thought. If we can’t be good, we can sure claim the intellectual high ground and devote ourselves to being evil genii. I am Mojo Jojo! You must obey! But Nooooooooo. Turns out, some studies show a general correlation between beauty and smarts,... Read more