In which Leah Libresco talks about her move from Patheos’s atheist portal to its Catholic one. I thought this was a sweet and moving post which is pretty clearly about a work in progress. Conversion is for life (not just for Christmas!) and we’re all making mistakes and making progress day by day. I’m super excited to see where this goes. Also, because I know she’ll appreciate it, I must once again quote David Ives’s play The New Jerusalem: The... Read more
My one specific criticism of Dawn Eden’s new book, My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints (featured on the Patheos Book Club! and here’s my actual, positive review of it), is in her recommendation of Courage as part of the resource guide at the end of the book. Courage is the official US Catholic ministry for people with same-sex attraction. I know a bunch of people who have been a part of it... Read more
Part of the Patheos Book Club–go and read the other posts on this book as well! My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, by Dawn Eden, is the first book I’ve read from a specifically Catholic perspective on healing from sexual abuse. I don’t come to this as an expert so I’ll just tell you what the book is, and what it does which is especially valuable. The book is structured around saints’... Read more
“Fire! Fire!” exclaimed five men and one woman dressed in matching purple Byzantine pants, purple but streaked with white iris roots twining asymmetrically into knots over the knees before unraveling into crisp points above the feet, like so many witnesses identifying a wanted person. Read more
I’m not sure I can think of any father-daughter relationships in books or movies which really remind me of me and my dad. I have only vague memories of Ramona and Her Father, but I super-identified with Ramona in general and I seem to recall that she and her father had somewhat similar personalities? So that’s one possible model. But I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of fathers, in pop culture or great art or whatever, who remind me... Read more
And other acts of theodicy. Read more
We cross the dunes on a narrow path, stepping over the wooden pickets of a low, rambling fence which may have been put up to retain sand against the ravages of the tide. The stakes, once red, now a softer hue, stand erect only in a few places. Most of them are half buried in the dunes; they are lavender eyelashes lowered against white cheeks. Read more
“As to your question, ‘Why do we put up with Bob?’, I should have thought that nothing would be easier to do. He’s a charming young man. We are all equals now.” Herbert’s closing words, delivered almost inaudibly, arose as unexpectedly out of the drift of his argument as a human arm out of the waves at night. Read more
I am the first person in the house to awaken, but I am unsure of the implications. I can’t be absolutely certain, of course, whether everyone else is still sleeping, but the other two men in the room are breathing heavily and their hands are stretched out, curled or closed in positions that seem at once natural and improbable–in short, I doubt whether anyone would be clever enough to improvise such convincing gestures of repose. –This is the opening of... Read more
So now I’m revisiting all of the answers in Leah’s Ideological Turing Test in order to see which ones I straight-up liked. Keep in mind that I strongly disliked both of my own answers! So far the only one I’ve really liked and whose author I wanted to know better is this fake atheist. Well, actually, there were many other entries (both real and fake, and both atheist and Christian) which had points I found intriguing but which didn’t develop... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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