What (and Who) Is Punishment For? I’m at The American Conservative

Last updated on: June 4, 2019 at 10:08 am By Eve Tushnet

with an essay riffing on the provocative, if incomplete, work of a Trump-appointed federal judge: A 17-year-old black girl pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter in her boyfriend’s death—even though the boyfriend was actually killed by a police officer. A judge is recalled by voters after handing down what’s perceived as a shockingly light sentence to a college athlete convicted of sexual assault. These are two stories from America’s “punishment factory,” the term Trump-appointed federal judge Stephanos Bibas coined in his... Read more

Raissa Maritain : Souffrance :: me : Sleaziness

Last updated on: June 3, 2019 at 4:35 pm By Eve Tushnet

Yesterday I finished Brenna Moore’s Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905 – 1994). It’s a sensitive and provocative exploration of the spiritual discipline and philosophy of Maritain, a Russian Jewish convert who spent World War II in exile in America. Moore describes how Maritain, like many converts of the French Catholic revival, became enthralled by the Church precisely because of the ways She stood against the clinical, scientistic modernity of their secular... Read more

And the Yanks, They Were Within

Last updated on: May 15, 2019 at 6:42 pm By Eve Tushnet

Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland is a book as concise, and almost as elegant and sharp, as its title. Those five words tell you almost the whole story: how his Irish father met his Irish-American mother, how she became pregnant, how they broke up and he returned to Ireland while she ended up in the fatherless oubliettes of American suburbia; how she took her son to Irish-language weekend retreats, sang the old rebel songs to him, handed... Read more

Seeking Stories of Dentistry as a Corporal Work of Mercy

Last updated on: May 14, 2019 at 12:39 pm By Eve Tushnet

Hey all. Problems with your teeth can cause serious health issues; missing or damaged teeth can keep you from getting jobs, and can be both symptom and cause of depression and despair. And yet there’s even less support for dental care in the US than for other forms of health care, and people with bad teeth are often blamed for them and given less help or compassion rather than more. I’m working on a piece about the spiritual aspects of... Read more

Notes from a “Pilgrimage to Hostage Relics”

Last updated on: May 14, 2019 at 11:26 am By Eve Tushnet

This past Saturday a small band of weirdos met in a park to practice our chant, then headed to the Cloisters to do some guerrilla venerating. Our pilgrimage made me think about relics; and about public witness, and the relationship between these two aspects of Christian practice. The Cloisters, like many other museums, holds certain real relics, including a relic of the True Cross. First of all, relics should be venerated not merely appreciated; second of all, relics should not... Read more

“A Gimlet Eye Beneath a Chapel Veil”: My tribute to Antonia White

Last updated on: May 12, 2019 at 1:34 pm By Eve Tushnet

at the University Bookman: “We work to-day to turn out, not accomplished young women, nor agreeable wives, but soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude.” These words express the mission of the Convent of the Five Wounds, where nine-year-old Nanda Grey is sent shortly before World War I. Nanda, the daughter of a recent convert to Catholicism, plunges eagerly into the world of the Five Wounds—a world where the only storybooks allowed are martyrs’ lives (“the pressing... Read more

A Child’s Garden of Anarchy

Last updated on: May 7, 2019 at 1:55 pm By Eve Tushnet

A couple years ago, my friend’s toddler invented a game he could make his mother play. “Mama, lie down!” (She did this happily, let me tell you.) “Okay, mama. You are a beached whale. And I’m a police officer giving you a ticket.” Kids are cops, this is the conventional wisdom. Kids love rules and playacting that they get to make and enforce the rules; in their play they treat rules and enforcement as ends in themselves. The purpose of... Read more

Two Charcoal Fires, Two Words for Love: Ron Belgau on Peter and Jesus by the Sea of Tiberias

Last updated on: May 6, 2019 at 9:58 am By Eve Tushnet

this is great stuff: After breakfast, Peter and Jesus had a conversation which raises an interesting question about how to understand the verbs for love—agapáo and philéo—used in the original Greek. Agapáo (Strong’s #25) is a verb that means “to love” related to the noun agápe (love). Philéo (Strong’s #5368) is also a verb usually translated “to love,” related to the nouns phílos, (friend) and philía (friendship). The passage is difficult to translate because although English has always had separate... Read more

“Ecstasy in Celibacy” and Other Queer Ideas

Last updated on: April 24, 2019 at 1:14 pm By Eve Tushnet

The workshop descriptions for Revoice 2K19 are live! Revoice is a conference which seeks “to support and encourage gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other same-sex attracted Christians—as well as those who love them—so that all in the Church might be empowered to live in gospel unity while observing the historic Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.” As far as I know it’s the only such conference, in the world. I went last year, the first year. I gave an incoherent talk... Read more

Being Shut Out of the Perfect Closed Sphere of Faith: I’m at The Catholic Woman

Last updated on: April 24, 2019 at 11:25 am By Eve Tushnet

being a Catholic woman: Hey– Back in 1998 or 1999, when I was a very recent convert to Catholicism and full of boisterous, somewhat obnoxious delight in the Church, I told my best friend that as a Catholic, “It’s just that my worldview is so unified!” One of the great blessings of friendship is that she made fun of me for this for twenty years. It can be easy to feel like the Catholic Church hands you an intricate, interlocking... Read more