The Shortest, Gladdest Daze of Life: Brief movie reviews

Last updated on: March 7, 2019 at 3:40 pm By Eve Tushnet

Primal Fear: A 1996 suspense flick that feels more late-’80s. Richard Gere plays a transcendantly sleazy criminal-defense lawyer who snaps up the case of a young man accused of brutally murdering Chicago’s beloved archbishop. As the trial approaches, the late archbishop’s financial entanglements and sexual crimes begin to come to light, and the defense lawyer has to switch strategies, trying what I refuse to call a Hail Mary pass in order to get his client off the hook. The defendant... Read more

“The Value of Public Penance in the Age of Clerical Abuse, Mass Incarceration, And #MeToo”: I’m in America

Last updated on: February 23, 2019 at 10:24 am By Eve Tushnet

the magazine, though also the country: Bishop Knestout is not the only U.S. prelate to have made public acts of self-abasement in penance for clerical abuse. Bishop Frank Caggiano of Bridgeport, Conn., and Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis, Ind., have also publicly prostrated themselves. Bishop Robert Reed of Boston, Mass., spent 24 hours in fasting and prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. In a column for his churches’ bulletins, he invited the faithful to join him as he did “the... Read more

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: Some notes on Mary of Egypt

Last updated on: February 15, 2019 at 11:41 pm By Eve Tushnet

If you are up-front about your experience of either addiction, or let’s say marginalized sexuality, and you spend a lot of time with Christians from Orthodox or Eastern Catholic churches, eventually somebody will tell you to pray to Mary of Egypt. This is probably a good idea (look at this lady! Do you want to get in her way? Neither does sin) and I do it every night; and yet I am pretty ambivalent about her story, and want to... Read more

“The Conjuring” Is a Perfect Valentine’s Day Movie…

Last updated on: February 14, 2019 at 1:38 pm By Eve Tushnet

…mostly for bad reasons. Spoilers below. The Conjuring, from Saw perpetrator James Wan, tells the story of two families: the Perrons, mom & dad plus five totally adorable daughters, and the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine and what Scripture would call their one ewe lamb. The Perrons are nominally Christian but haven’t had their kids baptized yet. Dad (Ron Livingston) is a trucker and since this all takes place in the early ’70s he’s got remarkably, endearingly ugly styling–he has the... Read more

Down the Wrong Road, Both Ways

Last updated on: February 22, 2019 at 4:19 pm By Eve Tushnet

Toward the end of 2017, I think, I started doing something which I eventually called “time-travel rosary.” (I dislike this twee name but haven’t found a catchier one.) I dedicated each week to some period in my life, and the people who were important to me at that time. I prayed a decade of my day’s rosary specifically for those people, and offered up–well, not sacrifices precisely because what do you want from me, people???, but any restraint I was... Read more

I Believe the Correct Term Is “Worlds War II”: Short movie & book reviews on a theme

Last updated on: February 8, 2019 at 2:15 pm By Eve Tushnet

Arts and entertainments from four nations caught in the catastrophe of the century of progress. Or, four very different World War IIs. First, the book: Andrzej Szczypiorski’s The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, which I read in Klara Glowczewska’s translation. This is a fractal portrait of Poland, in which every chapter follows a different person from prewar life to death. All these people get caught up in one microcosm event: the arrest of Irma Seidenman, who is living under an assumed name... Read more

Bringing Your Pilgrimage Home: I write about World Youth Day & Adoptive Brotherhood

Last updated on: January 25, 2019 at 4:54 pm By Eve Tushnet

at the Catholic Herald: In 1985, two historians traveled through Turkey and the Middle East together. Robin Darling Young and Susan Ashbrook Harvey started the trip as friends; they came home as sisters. Their bond of spiritual sisterhood was forged in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Here, over what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Mar Dionysius Behnam Jajaweh told Young and Harvey to join their right hands, which he “wrapped... Read more

Desert Hearts: I watch “The Jewish Cardinal”

Last updated on: January 20, 2019 at 10:18 pm By Eve Tushnet

Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them. –St Teresa of Ávila, granddaughter of a Jewish man forced to convert to Catholicism The Jewish Cardinal is a 2013 biopic of Jean-Marie (ne Aaron) Lustiger, a Jew who converted to Catholicism at age 14, a few months after the Nazis occupied France. The storyline of the movie is basically that one fact, its implications and its inner engines and its inescapability. It’s... Read more

Alms for Oblivion: I review a new biography of Edward Gorey

Last updated on: January 20, 2019 at 11:35 am By Eve Tushnet

at the University Bookman: Many years ago I saw an obituary notice in the local gay newspaper. Above a desolate, elegantly hand-drawn landscape ran the motto: “Last night it did not seem as if today it would be raining.” And then the dates of a loved one’s birth and death. The picture and the words were from Edward Gorey’s little book, The Sopping Thursday. Gorey is famous now as a master of the macabre, with an oeuvre full of menacing... Read more

Credit in the Straight World: I watch “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

Last updated on: January 11, 2019 at 7:03 pm By Eve Tushnet

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a straightforward rise-and-fall tale. Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a once-successful writer who has alienated everybody around her beyond the point where they’re willing to help her get paid, is behind on her rent and living in depressive squalor. When illness threatens her only friend (a cat… no judgment) Lee has to get cash into the vet’s hands fast. A coincidence sends her spiraling into the world of literary letter forgery, as she passes off... Read more