Today at the Personalist Project, I’m writing about Anna Jarvis and the founding of Mother’s Day, and what we can learn about love from the placement of an apostrophe. “Anna Jarvis was never able to put the genie of Mother’s Day back in the bottle. This weekend, mothers everywhere will get store-bought cards and flowers, bought on sale or as fundraisers. There will be encomiums delivered at pulpits and from stages about the ideal of motherhood and what it means... Read more
(Or is this just fantasy?) I attended a very small Catholic college, with student life policies that were—to be fair, more lenient than some other small Catholic college—but still somewhat restrictive. Almost without exception, when someone (student or local or someone’s family member) wanted to criticize the student life policies, or complain about the small-community social dynamics and drama, they would say dismissively, “just wait until you get into the REAL world” or “but this isn’t REAL life.” More recently, I’ve seen... Read more
This Sunday, perhaps we can pray that we all find the grace to rejoice with those who rejoice, even as we grieve with those who grieve. Read more
The Black Lives Matter movement is undoubtedly political. But it begins in the personal stories of young black men affected by the context in which they live–a context that puts them at greater risk of being injured or killed by police, a context which can’t help but be both political and personal. Sometimes it takes witnessing the effects of our public imagination–an imagination within which young black men are portrayed as “thugs”–to see that what is personal is also public. In the party scene from... Read more
Earlier this week, late night show host Jimmy Kimmel opened his show with a tearful monologue about his newborn son’s life-threatening heart condition. The video is raw and heart-wrenching enough to go viral just as the testimony of a new father’s too-close brush with human frailty and mortality. But Kimmel went further. After a long list of thank-yous to hospital staff, family, and friends, he noted that children like his son are affected by the decisions made by lawmakers, and... Read more
“We live the given life, and not the planned.” – Wendell Berry I first fell in love with the words and wisdom of Wendell Berry, Kentucky’s tireless poet, essayist, and advocate for agrarian values, while standing in the stacks of Powell’s book store in Portland, Oregon, on a bright and cool spring day a decade ago. I bought a small book of essays—Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community—while in the city to attend a friend’s wedding. I read the entire... Read more
“One of the arguments we often use for not writing is this: “I have nothing original to say. Whatever I might say, someone else has already said it, and better than I will ever be able to.” This, however, is not a good argument for not writing. Each human person is unique and original, and nobody has lived what we have lived. Furthermore, what we have lived, we have lived not just for ourselves but for others as well. Writing... Read more
Christ died. He suffered that sundering of body and soul that awaits us all, so that we could live beyond it and know a bodily resurrection. But his Passion began before his crucifixion, and I’ve begun to wonder whether his Passion might not have begun even earlier, with his Incarnation, with the small violations of the body that plague all men and women…. Christ was dependent on his mother while in utero. He was a weak and helpless infant. He... Read more
I woke up this morning to the sound of a child retching in the bathroom. Not how anyone wants to begin a holiday morning. This is how my day started: up at 6:30 after a scant four hours of interrupted sleep, blearily cleaning up child and environs, disinfecting things, comforting, and trying to gather enough brain cells to work out how our plans would have to be adjusted around this development. Christ is risen. Alleluia, right? I settled the child,... Read more
There’s a powerful guest post over at Simcha Fisher’s blog today about abuse in Catholic marriages. An excerpt: Very often the faithful spouse suffers in isolation, feeling compelled to endure more abuse to be faithful to their marriage, family, Church. They need to hear that they aren’t alone, that they are loved and that they need to make hard decisions based on the situation they are actually living, not based on who they hope their spouse might turn into. I have... Read more
Peace and Pekoe
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