at Cracked: …Even when these deprivations do come true for you, it’s much easier to cope with them one at a time as they crop up. You simply encounter the problem, you go, “Arrrrrgh, nnnngh, I didn’t know I was going to have to deal with this, everything sucks, life sucks, I don’t believe in God anymore,” and then a week later you get used to it and you’re like, “OK, I guess this is part of the routine now,... Read more
Some really striking, lovely, vivid sculpture from Ellen Jewett [image removed but it’s great, trust me] more! there are rats! and Brad Spencer [likewise] more! Via Matt Jones and Wesley Hill respectively. Read more
The Level Ground Film Festival, which explores the intersection of Christian faith and LGBT life, has already started! I will be doing a whole bunch of stuff with them Thursday and Friday: the Dinner Gala on Thursday, where I’m on a panel screening of the film “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” (exploring the lives of monks with same-sex attraction); the Festival of Books on Friday morning, where I will be reading the chapter on vocation from my forthcoming book about... Read more
for AmSpec: Hirokazu Koreeda’s new film, Like Father, Like Son, pretends that it will be up front about the source of its heartbreak. Koreeda is the tragedian behind 2004’s Nobody Knows, based on the real-life horror of several small children abandoned in their Tokyo apartment after their mother disappeared. This time he takes a parental perspective: Like Fatheropens with a couple learning that their only child was switched at birth, and is not biologically related to them. There’s a standard... Read more
at AmCon: A student is raped by a classmate, goes to the campus center for help, and is grilled about whether she provoked the rape, told she has to confront her accuser personally in order to be taken seriously, and, ultimately, hounded off of campus, since her post-traumatic stress makes her “unstable.” You might recognize all the details from The New Republic‘s story about Patrick Henry College’s alleged mishandling of rape cases, but the above incident is drawn from Angie Epifano’s experience... Read more
They performed an exercise of “company in the attack,” became entirely intermixed, extricated themselves and bivouacked under the stars. A warm night, smelling of dry furze. Guy made a round of the sentries and then lay awake. Dawn came quickly, bringing momentary beauty even to that sorry countryside. They fell in and marched back to camp. Rather light-headed after his sleepless night Guy marched in front beside de Souza. From behind them came the songs: “Roll out the barrel”; “There... Read more
for AmSpec. (Which Nationals? you ask. Men’s figure skating obviously. There is only one sport.) In early January, I attend my very first professional sports competition. The U.S. National Figure Skating Championships have already been going on for four days; the event sprawls over four disciplines and five age categories. I’m at Boston’s TD Garden to watch the senior men, including the two men we’ll be sending to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Sport, like art, uses the limited body... Read more
This week, in Things I Care About: Not just the identity of the man in the car park with the twisted spine, but the appalling last moments and humiliating treatment of the naked body of Richard III in the hours after his death have been revealed at an extraordinary press conference at Leicester University. … “I’m a medievalist really,” Morris said. “I don’t go much for the Tudors. Even if Richard did kill the princes in the tower, you have... Read more
with an actual review of Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City: Painfully conscientious, rule-bound, and motivated more by spiritual longings than by practical material concerns—these aren’t the terms in which most Americans think of low-income unmarried fathers. subscribers-only for now; I’ll let you know if that changes. I had a more thematic piece on penitence in the book, not really a review, here. Read more
Some links for a slushy Saturday evening. “LGBT Rights and the UN: What the Church Does Not Teach.” Powerful. “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators.” Basically because we’ve always had it too easy and don’t know how to work. I’d heard most of this before and it very much rings true for me–studying Russian has been a fairly brutal confrontation with my own limits, my quick temper and immediate frustration and a whole host of other character defects which are... Read more
Eve Tushnet
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In