See if you can guess the sci-fi twist. Sometimes, real life can be stranger than parody. This can be particularly true when it comes to the beat we cover here at The Watch, civil liberties. With that in mind, I’ve gone out on a limb to make some predictions about what might happen on the civil liberties front in 2015. I realize that some of these prognostications may seem a wee bit hyperbolic, a bit paranoid, maybe even a little... Read more
Three links. Happy New Year! Not a solution: police body cameras: …Despite the push for body cameras by policymakers and politicians, many organizers (both in New York and around the country) are not entirely convinced that body cameras are a meaningful reform—especially after Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for killing Eric Garner on camera. Andrew Padilla is disturbed “that all this energy towards accountability…can be flipped into increased surveillance in communities of color and increased budgets to police.” The body... Read more
A really rambling post. Now that my book is out I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and in many of them I’ve been asked to tell my conversion story. A huge part of my conversion involved realizing that the Catholic Church wasn’t what I’d thought it was. For example, I had this image that the Church opposed and rejected the human body–the beauty of the body, the joy of the senses–and denigrated all sensual beauty and pleasure, from the... Read more
at Reason: If you paid attention to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, you probably know that some of the centralized institutions charged with disaster relief, such as the Red Cross and FEMA, performed very poorly. You may also have heard about Occupy Sandy, an Occupy Wall Street spinoff devoted to helping people after the storm; by all accounts it performed very well. The latter group’s effectiveness was recognized even by the Department of Homeland Security, an organization not ordinarily inclined to look... Read more
makes some solid recommendations: I’ll be watching both Black Christmases this holiday season along with assorted Silent Nights but I decided to take a break as far as posting about them. I feel that anyone who has done a “Help Mrs. Mac Find Her Hidden Hooch” puzzle has done their due. After seven years the idea of writing about the usual horror Christmas flicks made me want to hang myself like a stocking and that’s not very Christmas-y at all... Read more
I know we’ve got a few more days of 2014, but I’m sick and I’m wallowing. Nothing but true crime and schlocky suspense/horror for me until the New Year. So let’s do this thing! As always I will wander freely and without warning between “best” and “favorite.” Best books read (nonfiction): Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, And Sons. I read this because Wesley Hill loves it so much. What should I read... Read more
This essay takes a while to get going, but it’s a good, steady look at the way aesthetics and theology can lead us to flatten human experience–especially when “us” is white Americans writing about race. As somebody with a very “suffering and humiliation keep you close to Christ, you should consider them sometime” spiritual style myself, it was good to get a reminder of the way that kind of spirituality can cut against a communal pursuit of justice. As somebody... Read more
I recently read a q&a with two authors in which one of them, Rachel Manija Brown, was asked for recommendations of books on post-traumatic stress. She’s written some really clear & useful posts on the subject, so I was interested in what she’d say–and especially intrigued when she cited a children’s fantasy novel as “one of my favorite depictions of how war can make people completely lose their minds, and how some of them come back from that and some... Read more
Reposting this piece from 2012 by Msgr Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington: Many are shocked to walk into daily Mass on December 26 and instead of hearing more of the “Baby Jesus” we are confronted with Martyrdom, “The Feast of Stephen” is ancient on the Church’s calendar. More ancient than the Christmas cycle and hence it was not removed to another time. Bu the martyrdom does not stop there. We are in the midst of the Christmas Octave, an... Read more
Surprisingly heartwarming! Read more
Eve Tushnet
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