I first experienced pornography when I was 10 years old. It was 1985. One of my younger uncles had come to live with us for a while, and he stashed his collection of porn magazines in a box in the attic. My brother and I came across them while looking for the Easter decorations, buried beneath the long-handled wicker baskets and tangled messes of green plastic grass. I remember the paper was slick and the photos were bright. The women had big,... Read more
“The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise. That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called out ‘Lord,’ the... Read more
So, full disclosure. I’m a Cardinal fan. A serious, committed, Cardinal fan. Since the age of five, I listened to Jack Buck call the games while in my bed, sweating from the heat of my stifling old farmhouse in Southern Indiana. And, I’m a baseball fan. My childhood memories are full of my grandfather’s baseball card shop, walking to the corner drug store in my small town to get baseball cards with the money I dug out of the couch,... Read more
In October we called for spooky stories from all our friends who follow the blog, and my friend Joanna told me some unnerving tales of her experiences with a Ouija board: I am a freshman in college home for fall or winter break. The board is still at my house, and I’ve decided to play with it by myself. I soon find that it does indeed seem to be pulling toward different letters. I contact an older male family friend,... Read more
On November 2, the Catholic Church celebrates All Souls’ Day, to remember and pray for all who have died; not just the saints we assume are already in Heaven (all saints). The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.... Read more
The recent death of Jack Chick made me think about my own personal history with Halloween. For awhile, we celebrated the holiday like any normal Catholic family. The last year I remember dressing up, I wore a Yoda costume because of my deep abiding love for Star Wars. But, as my parents got deeper into the Charismatic movement, they stopped letting my sister and me celebrate Halloween. I don’t blame them, as they got bombarded with all the supposed evils... Read more
At that time, Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he reached the place,... Read more
Editor’s Note:This post discusses ritualistic cutting and self-injury in the context of a theology of blood. If you or someone you love practices non-suicidal self-injury to relieve emotional pain, more information and resources are available here. More than half of girls aged 10-14 and one in five aged 10-18 ritualistically bleed themselves through cutting practices they say “make them feel alive” as they silently “cry tears of blood” that “relieve the pain.” I called a friend who habitually cut... Read more
We’ve been relishing October here at the blog, though not for all the pumpkin-spiced crap. We enjoy the unabashed focus on the eerie, the ghostly, the supernatural; for many of us at Sick Pilgrim, they served as our gateway to Christianity and the Church. So this time of year is, in many ways, our homecoming. This month we bring you our regular listicle of small joys with a twist: “Things Keeping the Undead Alive,” suggestions for cheap-to-free things that will give... Read more
HAW! HAW! HAW! My parents threw themselves into the charismatic movement of the late 1970’s and early 80’s. Every Sunday, we would drive to a weekly charismatic prayer meeting. Being a book person even at the age of seven, I always looked at their large book table. As I shopped around one evening, I noticed a bunch of tracts with cool drawings on the front. One caught my eye because it had a spooky looking ghost on the front.... Read more
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