Most major mythologies say that humanity will end up in either a hades or a heaven. Their destination might be based on merit, usually on wealth, sometimes on whim. But there they go, either through a series of perfection or an interrupting rapture. It’s hard to imagine an ending to the world other than one or the other. This cosmic threshing remains a philosophical option. The mythology lives on. Take, for instance, the first season of HBO’s “True Detective.” Much... Read more
This past Saturday Fare Forward held a panel discussion in Washington, DC on Will Seath’s article “This Is What We Do”, published in the most recent issue of FF. The piece was a profile on Chris Currie, a local official in Hyattsville, MD who has been a lead player in building up an organic Catholic community in this streetcar suburb. In particular, Currie helped to save a parish school, St. Jerome’s, and has facilitated young Catholic families moving into the area, creating... Read more
In its first season, Orange is the New Black (OITNB) was a show about a motley crew of women prisoners premised on the fact that these women were much more than criminals. They were mothers, wisecracks, lovers, entrepreneurs, dreamers and, most of all, friends (albeit among racial lines). It was also, on the other hand, a show about how there are “criminal” desires in all of us, even in bourgeois, educated people like Piper, the protagonist in the first... Read more
The neighborhood where I grew up traditionally hosts its Fourth of July festivities on the Friday before the holiday. The theory, so I understand, is to be able to draw revelers from adjacent communities by avoiding competing with everyone else’s Independence Day events. I’m tempted to speculate that this profit-maximization logic makes this late June party more American than its July 4th counterparts. Though the celebration is supported by local government, it’s actually hosted by a shopping center down the... Read more
As a fresh-faced college student in Montréal, I decided to go explore the city that would be my home for the following three years. One of of the first things I happened across (yes, happened, I am terrible with maps) was the basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal. Beautiful though it was, the thing that caught my attention most was a sign hanging outside advertising a light show. The sign read “Et la lumière fut”. Whoa! I immediately realized that this was... Read more
Marie was a young woman who struggled with her weight, starting from a young age. At seven, her mother placed her on her first diet. At fifteen, they took her to an institution to be treated for bulimia. Like all chronic dieters, she suffered from a weight that yoyo-ed. Marie could never be satisfied, for she was bombarded daily with advertisements demanding she live up to our culture’s paradoxical ideal – enjoying food in overabundance, eating out often and cleaning... Read more
“Rise & grind! Busy day!! Gym then packing 4 Paris again! This is the despair of finitude, when the self is lost to the temporal, the trivial,” tweeted Kim Kierkegaardashian, a Twitter account that combines Søren Kierkegaard quotes and Kim Kardashian’s tweets. As the New Yorker reports, this feed offers “reflective maxims on life, death, sin, and emptiness, salted with luxury accessories of the Kardashian lifestyle.” The Washington Post explains, “Basically what you have is profound ideas that exercise your... Read more
In the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches today is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, when we recall the birth of St. John and his role as a forerunner to Christ. Above we’ve inserted a clip of Ut Queant Laxis, one traditional chant from this feast day. The words, sung in Latin, translate this way: So that your servants may, with loosened voices, resound the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John.... Read more
Some books and songs and movies and talks stay with you, and the longer they stay with you, the more you feel the need to share them. This past January, I heard a short discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought (called Thomism) that was among the most compelling I’d yet encountered. It’s stayed with me, and I wanted to highlight it, especially in light of conversations I’ve had with some friends lately about putting Christ at the center of our... Read more
My favorite character on The Big Bang Theory is Sheldon. How to summarize seven seasons of him? He’s a theoretical physicist at Cal-Tech who holds four graduate degrees and started college at age eleven. Spock is one of his heroes. He has trouble detecting sarcasm but has made progress in employing it. He drives the other characters crazy with his arrogance, fussiness, and compulsive need for routine, even though they concede that they probably wouldn’t all be such good friends... Read more
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