On Martin Luther King Day, I mused about how my relation to African-Americans has been shaped over the years. When I was a child, my father would sometimes take me into work with him on Saturdays. He was a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he ran a research lab (with real rats, whom I liked to watch cavorting in their cages). This was the early 1950s, well before the Civil Rights movement was making national news. Down... Read more
This is a story that is more about what I don’t know than what I do. On the Friday night after Thanksgiving, the third night of Chanukah, my neighbor Rose, next-door neighbor to St. Linda, died. Just three or four days before, her adult son who lived with her—retirement age himself—had called to tell us that his elderly mother, whom we had seen less and less in the last month or two, was in home hospice care and did not... Read more
Guest post by Jen Hinst-White The mind is always elsewhere, won’t stay put. Whose merciful hands, then, Could bind us to our longing? —Katy Didden, “The Penitentes’ Morada” In my early twenties I used to daydream of the perfect job to complement writing. The criteria were these: It had to be part-time; I wanted hours leftover to write at my desk. It need not be high-paying; I was a budgeter, lived simply. And then this: It should require the use... Read more
When someone dies, we say to the surviving family members, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And we mean it. But there are other ways than death to lose someone dear—or someone who should be dear. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell explores these varieties of loss in her latest poetry collection, Waking My Mother. The poems reflect on her mother’s dementia and dying; on her mother’s relation to Angela and her siblings when they were kids; on the emotional complexities of living, after... Read more
It’s January 1 and the first Mass of the year finds me slouched onto the kneeler, sleepy-headed and negligent. It’s a Holy Day of obligation and I don’t want to start off on a bad foot. Never able to get to the vigil on New Year’s Eve, I always shuffle into the pew the next morning with the same disoriented outlook. I even say the same things to myself every year: I have to start things off right; I have... Read more
Guest Post by Stuart Scadron-Wattles I did not expect to give my eight-year-old grandson a stopwatch for Christmas, it just happened. My wife Linda usually takes charge of the stocking stuffer gifts. With an extended family of eleven stretching over three generations and an agreed-on maximum of two gifts per stocking, it can be a daunting exercise. Linda has become a skilled surfer of the Internet, however, and between that and the nightly debriefing talks we were having, she was... Read more
I found respite recently in Jeanne Murray Walker’s essay on Alice Munro in Image, describing Munro’s domestic fiction, and related utterly to Walker’s wrestling with “Doing Something Important.” It is a place I find myself often, wondering if the few hours a week I have of child care for the baby are an example of my missing what I am supposed to be living and learning. Jesus does not say to come to him as someone Doing Something Important, but... Read more
In yesterday’s post I wrote about author and critic Paul Elie’s contention that few contemporary writers depict characters struggling with religious belief in novels with contemporary settings. Among other things, I argued that his conviction that having a contemporary setting is somehow supremely valuable is both short-sighted and literalistic—that Elie has a rather narrow understanding of what “contemporaneity” actually means. Of course, another possible response to Elie is to simply marshal another list of writers who have, in fact, written... Read more
Writing a response to a published essay can be seen as public service, a way of contributing to the larger cultural conversation. On the other hand, writing several responses within a relatively short period of time can easily come across as carping or sour grapes. That consideration is very much at the forefront of my mind as I set out here to extend a running dialogue I’ve been having with Paul Elie, the author of The Life You Save May... Read more
Continued from yesterday. Gioia seems to be suggesting two conditions necessary for a resurgence of Catholic literature. The first is the arrival of a “few innovators” who will provide a “cultural catalyst,” and the second is that the “Catholic writer recover confidence in his or her own spiritual, cultural, and personal identity.” Reasonable enough, right? However, if I understand him correctly, due to the “vast impoverishments” in the arts and the Church caused by the “schism between Christianity and... Read more
Good Letters
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In