The Power of Names

Last updated on: September 19, 2016 at 10:00 am By A. G. Harmon

A few weeks back, the news related a story that a confederate veteran killed at Shiloh and buried under the wrong name for one hundred fifty-four years will now have that mistake rectified. Augustus Beckmann was buried under the name “A. Bergman” at Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio. The descendants of the German immigrant, who fought in the Texas infantry, discovered the mistake while on a visit to the memorial grounds. Thanks to a refreshingly un-bureaucratic government response,... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Homily”

Last updated on: August 30, 2016 at 5:29 pm By Guest Contributor

Last Sunday I was trying to decide whether to go church or take a walk along the river on a beautiful summer day in my corner of northwestern Washington. Some days I have time to do both and some days, for some justifiable reason, I do neither. The poem “Homily” by Todd Davis is both beautiful and deceptively stirring and particularly useful to me when faced with this decision. He writes, “I have been thinking about the God/ I pray... Read more

Unfriending, Impractical Jokes, and Other Foibles

Last updated on: September 6, 2016 at 6:20 pm By Tania Runyan

If I were to graph my mental health over the past five years, the line might resemble a stegosaurus spine with several points and plunges, that, thanks be to God, climb overall to a place of greater acceptance and peace. But damn, do those jagged edges hurt. Over the past couple of months, hormones, summer sleeplessness, and the stress of starting a new business have joined forces to throw a deranged dance party in my brain. I’ve felt more vulnerable... Read more

What My Kid Knew about Kubo

Last updated on: September 6, 2016 at 5:31 pm By Brad Fruhauff

[Spoiler alert: This post is about the end of the movie, Kubo and the Two Strings. However, since, I believe, the ending nearly spoils the film itself, you can read this and still enjoy the other, real pleasures of the movie.] In the dramatic climax of Kubo and the Two Strings, our young hero defies the cold will of his grandfather, the Moon King, standing in a graveyard with nothing but his shamisen and delivering a (frankly) pretty forgettable speech... Read more

My September 11 Story, and Ours, Part II

Last updated on: September 6, 2016 at 2:54 pm By Caroline Langston

For Scott Simon, and for Bill Craven Continued from yesterday. In the back of my closet, inside a cellophane folder where I keep the rarest papers I own, there is a plain piece of unremarkable 8 ½ by 11 printer paper. At the top of the paper is the inscrutable coding “TC2001091307CD22AM.” Just to look at this piece of paper makes me shiver, a bit, in recollection. Here’s why: The first days after September 11 were just as bewildering as... Read more

My September 11, and Ours: Part I

Last updated on: September 12, 2016 at 7:59 am By Caroline Langston

For Scott Simon, and for Bill Craven Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of September 11, and for those of us who lived through it, it can be dizzying to realize that there are now high school students who weren’t born when it happened. It has been one of the two signal public events of my adulthood. The other was the inauguration day of President Obama. The minutes and hours of each of those days were suffused with a sense of... Read more

Poetry Friday: “The News”

Last updated on: August 30, 2016 at 5:28 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

What do I do with the daily news of disasters? Do I mumble a quick prayer for the victims, then turn to my day’s to-do list? Do I ever pause and ponder: this disaster might have struck those I love, or even me? These are the questions that Shara McCallum turns over in “The News.” Her imagination doesn’t flinch from detailing the horrors. Yet she is also self-protective, and she knows this. I admire how she keeps her eyes both... Read more

The New Critics and the Barbarians

Last updated on: September 5, 2016 at 8:36 pm By Morgan Meis

The poet and writer Dana Gioia penned an essay for the December 2013 issue of First Things titled “The Catholic Writer Today: Catholic Writers Must Renovate and Reoccupy Their Own Tradition.” The essay does not inspire much confidence in the state of “Catholic” writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our own Gregory Wolfe wrote a response published in Image issue 79, called “The Catholic Writer, Then and Now.” Mr. Wolfe’s essay consists in a broadening of the discussion to... Read more

I Have No Idea Where I’m Going

Last updated on: September 2, 2016 at 5:50 pm By Elizabeth Duffy

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. —Thomas Merton When I volunteered to teach religious education to sixth graders at our church, it was in a weak moment of senseless altruism,... Read more

Of Cookbooks and Lynchings

Last updated on: September 2, 2016 at 5:21 pm By Richard Chess

“Men and women in automobiles stood up to watch him die.” That’s the sentence one student recalled when I asked the class what was memorable in Eula Biss’s essay “Time and Distance Overcome.” The man who died was a black man “accused of attacking a white woman.” For his alleged behavior, he was “tied to a telephone pole and burned.” After we discussed the short essay for about forty-five minutes—its structure, its late revelation of her personal connection to the... Read more