It is stunning that the Bishops are talking about sex! As long as you are the kind of person who wakes up stunned to see the sun rise, stunned to find that you have feet at the end of your legs, stunned to discover that the floor under those feet is still made out of wood, just like it has been for decades and decades. Read the rest at the Register. PIC John Paul II waving Read more
And Vladimir Putin is so, so good at being the crazy, crazy president of Russia. Check out this birthday present he gave himself: PIC Putin as Hercules These are just two. There’s a whole gallery full of paintings depicting him as Hercules, doing Herculean things. I guess this was done voluntarily as a tribute to him from his admiring citizens. Much like when my husband comes home in the evening and we are all sitting on the floor... Read more
Baby #1: Uh oh, I think the jelly I had on my toast yesterday might have had some GMOs in it. I better call my midwife … if I can get myself to admit to her what I did. I wonder if she will want to run some tests to make sure everything is still okay. No, wait, tests are bad, too! Oh, I’ve ruined everything, I’ve ruined the baby, and I haven’t even given birth yet! Baby #10: Someone call your father and... Read more
PIC photo of Hooker The Editors no longer have confidence in the soundness of the findings. Original article by Brian Hooker here. Retraction as follows: Retraction: Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young African American boys: a reanalysis of CDC data Brian S Hooker Additional article information Retraction The Editor and Publisher regretfully retract the article [1] as there were undeclared competing interests on the part of the author which compromised the peer review process. Furthermore, post-publication peer review raised... Read more
Here is the third installment in a series: Catholic Artist of the Month. Rather than constantly kvetching about mediocre, sentimental art by Christians, I’ll be featuring artists who are doing it right. This month, I’m delighted to present Neilson Carlin, whose Holy Family image, commissioned for the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in 2015, was recently unveiled by Archbishop Chaput. Carlin’s work has been widely exhibited. He specializes in commissioned sacred work, and has been training art students for many years at Studio Rilievo in... Read more
You have ideas, I know you do! The one rule is: it has to be fairly cheap, and cannot cause major upheaval or headaches for the pastor. No “replace everything with marble” or “assign a 24-hour on-call spiritual adviser to each parishioner” or “install heated holy water fonts” or “ban banjos.” Well, maybe that last one. Read the rest at the Register. Read more
From my new article in Our Sunday Visitor about Sam Rocha and his new album, Late to Love: [Rocha] experienced his first high liturgy at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and a whole new aesthetic world opened up. “I felt like I walked out of the folk tradition and walked into a marble hall,” he said. “It helped me process the idea that there is a bigger Church out there.” But stark aesthetic contrasts can sometimes be deceptive. “Whenever... Read more
As imagined by my nine-year-old: My husband pointed out that, while the older kids are almost always gentle and patient with Benny in real life, they jerk her around a lot in their art. Whoop, there she goes! Read more
PIC Care Bear farting a rainbow And I says to myself, I says, Sorry, Shakespeare! Sorry, Homer! Sorry, Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Melville, Doestoevsky, Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Dickens, and Thomas “Joyboy” Mann. Sorry to you all, but you have got to go, because I’m fairly sure that on page 243, right where nice little college girls and college boys could read it, someone got in someone else’s pants and didn’t drop dead... Read more
Loved this post from What do you do, dear: Learning when (NOT) to talk to strangers about my child’s disability. She says that when she was first learning to adapt to her son’s spina bifida and paralysis, she would make sure to correct the heck out of every stranger who made an innocent, incorrect assumption. I was basically punking any well-meaning stranger who happened to cross my path. No one was safe. There was the older gentleman at the camera shop who noticed... Read more
I Have to Sit Down
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