“A GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM“: My Inside Catholic column, on confession. Read more

BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM: A fascinating story of Islam, liquor stores, and getting fresh produce to “food deserts.” Via Get Religion, from whose worthwhile comments box I stole the post title. Read more

“THE END OF THE BEST FRIEND”: I cannot possibly improve on Ratty’s comment. (Also, while I obviously support strong and not anti-love efforts to reduce bullying, aren’t weird or socially-isolated children the ones who often rely most on their best friends rather than a large and intimidating social group? But mostly yeah, what she said.) Read more

TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH. Here I am with Ann Althouse talking about gay Catholic whatnot and jurisprudence and my many random opinions. I babble like a really ridiculous brook and also you get lots of hilarious shots of my hair. I have a lot of hair. I was very grateful for the opportunity! but I feel duty-bound to note that I don’t think I said anything I haven’t said on the blog already. Read more

ORDER FROM CONFUSION SPRUNG: As promised, some thoughts on the problems with the “intrinsically disordered” jargon the Church currently uses to describe homosexuality. I want to open by saying that the Catholic Church speaks a lot of languages. I have a really hard time with natural-law talk, for example, and also with Carmelite spirituality, even though both of those are really different! Whereas I respond really strongly to “theology of the body” and, to a certain extent, Christian neo-Platonism. But... Read more

“FIFTEEN TO LIFE“: I see someone put my old Crisis magazine piece on fixing the criminal justice system online. This is really not the piece I would write today but I think there are still some good things in it…. Read more

But let us proclaim proudly that we are hypocrites, that we will stop at nothing, not even hypocrisy, in our struggle to take control of our lives.—some manifesto or whatever I am obviously always going to prefer surrendering control to taking it, and in general I don’t think it will be hard for longtime readers to discern which bits of this manifesto I think are self-comforting relativism and which I think are necessary defenses of complicity (see here for a... Read more

UPDATERY: Ratty has more on famous authors’ texts from last night; and Andrew Sullivan reminds me of the best thing he’s ever written! Read more

“HOLDING YES AND NO TOGETHER IN ONE HAND”: Here, have a long but (I think) really fruitful discussion between me and the awesome Jendi Reiter. It’s about closets and complicity, and Catholics, and it’s part of the reason I’m working on a post about why I think the “intrinsically disordered” language the Church currently uses is simplistic and mechanical. I hope to offer alternative ways of talking about and understanding same-sex desire from a faithful Catholic perspective. Read more

“WHAT I LACK IN COMPASSION I MAKE UP FOR IN LACK OF COMPASSION”: So I killed the Rat’s weekend by introducing her to Texts from Last Night (warning: addictive and definitely not family-friendly!) and at some point we got onto this thing of attributing some of the texts to well-known authors. (And Alcibiades.) These aren’t all perfect matches, but they’re fun enough that I’m sharing them…. And be forewarned, this post is no safer for work than the site itself.... Read more