I WANT TO LIVE IN A BATHYSQUID: OK so I have inchoate problems with “steampunk” as a thing–even though you could argue that the fantasy novella was influenced by that whole aesthetic, since it’s kind of late-nineteenth-century England with magic and without colonies, which is four whole kinds of problematic–but this specific movie… this is something I predict that I will love with a stupid love. Via DLB. Read more

FEAST OF ST. JULIANA OF NICOMEDIA, a patroness of women in childbirth. Read more

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. Your sepulchral body, offered to me in the past tense, protects your soft centre from the intrusions of the outside world. I am one such intrusion, stroking you with necrophiliac obsession, loving the... Read more

“SIX IMPERFECT METAPHORS FOR CONVERSION.” My latest at Inside Catholic. Read more

“OFFICER PURCHASES FOOD FOR MAN CAUGHT STEALING.” Read more

SUNRISE, SUNSET: I recently had reason to look at the archives of MarriageDebate, and it made me think that you all might be interested to see how our site has changed over the years. On the one hand, we’re not a great example, because MD started as an attempt to host the best possible debates about gay marriage–when I was brought on board, my mandate was to make the site 50/50 pro- and con- on that, while keeping it fascinating... Read more

I’ll be all alone on Valentine’s Day. Spooning a bottle of wine… putting up pictures of Margaret Thatcher….–an adorable homosexual, overheard near home 2/9 Read more

“I AM A MAN.” Read more

SNOW AND RUMORS OF SNOW. Read more

DAUGHTERS OF IT’S-COMPLICATED: In June of 1945, with memories of Nazi book-burning still vivid, a group called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada excommunicated Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, after which they burned his newly published Sabbath Prayer Book. Although Kaplan is less known (and less read) today than his contemporaries Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he was in many ways the most radical Jewish philosopher or theologian of his era. So it is good... Read more