A cri de coeur! Where are the women who write weird, metaphor-laden personal songs about their fraught relationship with the Lord? Are there Sufjanes out there? I would really like music by women, in just about any genre, with lots of Christian stuff (they don’t have to be actual believers, just people with really intense relationships with God and the Church) and not prettified but raw. Not Avengers-type stuff about anger at the Church, or anyway not only that, but... Read more
(I’ll take any excuse to jam both “grok” and “shtik” into the same headline.) Now and then I find myself saying that you can accept Catholic teaching on [whatever, usually about gay stuff somehow] without being persuaded by or caring much about natural law theory. E.g. in the book I say, “This book is not a theological treatise defending the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality. I admittedly don’t always understand that teaching, and I don’t think you need to understand... Read more
Lying on the grass on the edge of Dupont Circle, away from the shade cast by the office buildings and trees, I listen closely to the sirens. They don’t fit in with the picturesque scene of office workers lunching on the grass, but there they are, faint, undoubtedly audible, and growing louder with each passing second. The couple that I followed to the circle from my store stand up and exit. As the sirens draw closer, the people lying on... Read more
This is the final part of my series on Leah Libresco‘s discussion group on “The Benedict Option” aka living a more communal or “thicker” Christian life. Parts one, two, three, four. This is gonna be a pretty rambling conclusion loosely linked by the theme of “place.” I’ve found it most helpful to view the discussion of “the Benedict Option” as a way of raising fruitful questions, not an attempt to provide a One Best Model. (It’s about having more-Christian problems,... Read more
Hey man, people rarely beat on ATMs: …It isn’t difficult to guess which groups of people are most likely to be affected by laws against walking in the street, wearing one’s pants too low, or “spending time idly.” It’s also probably a lot easier to avoid citations for having toys lying about (I’m still a little surprised this could be illegal) if you have a nice long drive way, or trees or fences to conceal the front yard. According to the Post-Dispatch,... Read more
This is part of a series on the “Benedict Option.” Part one, part two, part three. I mentioned that I was struck by the number of people at Libresco’s “Benedict Option” discussion who were in recovery themselves, or who had some close contact with recovery communities. I don’t want to make too much of this, really–I know more people are in recovery than I realize, and Leah’s thing was pretty much the opposite of a representative sample. But if we’re... Read more
Something about that headline is very very Voxy, but this article is a good intro if you haven’t been following this aspect of the situation: …A prosecutor is also often the only public official standing between a defendant and prison time. More than 90 percent of criminal convictions are resolved through a plea agreement, meaning only prosecutors and defendants — not judges and juries — have almost all the say in a great majority of cases that result in incarceration... Read more
at Vox: Nearly every state lets prisons and jails charge inmates for their own incarceration — room, board, clothing, and doctor’s visits — in a phenomenon called “pay-to-stay.” We don’t know exactly how many prisons and jails take advantage of “pay to stay.” The latest survey, done in 2005, found that 90 percent of jails surveyed charged inmates fees of one kind of another. In an era of tight budgets, the practice is probably even more widespread today. … In... Read more
One of the neat things about Libresco’s “Benedict Option” gathering (for what this actually was, see here and here) was that we had a few people from the growing Catholic neighborhood in Hyattsville, MD. This is a little place on the Green Line (yay), an attempt to build a community where Catholic life is visible, normal, and beautiful. You can get a taste of it from a profile at Fare Forward which included this description: The community’s power for such... Read more
Ave Maria Press came up with a terrific logo for Leah Libresco‘s new book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer. Against a starswept blue background, there’s a diagram of an atom with circling molecules–and the molecules form the beads of a rosary. I love the science-fiction flavor of this image; and I love the way it captures one of the greatest strengths of Leah’s book, her ability to craft memorable and poetic analogies for the... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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