There is no water in downtown Steubenville, and there’s an ice storm rolling in. This morning, people just a mile away from me awoke to nothing at all coming out of the pipes. The reservoirs are being repaired as quickly as possible, but there’s nothing now and there won’t be for several days or a week. People with boilers don’t have heat in their homes downtown. The timing could not be worse. The Friendship Room is staying open 24 hours a day all... Read more
It has likely come to your attention that, according to witnesses, yesterday the president referred to Haiti and the countries in the continent of Africa as “sh*tholes “and asked why we can’t get immigrants from Norway instead. At press time, Norway, which has free healthcare and a very generous social safety net, had politely refused the president’s offer. I don’t think the president understands how immigration works, but then again I never imagined that he did. News outlets jumped on... Read more
I decided to be one of those insufferable people who drinks healthy smoothies. Smoothies sound like a simple, healthful way to coax fruit and vegetables into my perpetually peevish belly. I could puree them with bananas and yogurt and other things easy for me to digest. And it would be an economical way to go through the frozen fruit I kept accumulating in the freezer because it looked like such a good value. Lately I found a box of high-protein... Read more
Written by Robert Miole Mark Shea recently posted about the latest ‘Satanic panic’ piece published by National Catholic Register, this time warning against the dangers of mindfulness meditation which, like yoga, will leave you frothing at the mouth with a pool of mysterious blood at your feet as you emerge from the ecstasy of communing with the snake spirit at the base of your spine. Or something like that. Because the whole NCR interview reads like it was written by... Read more
Yesterday, the Franciscan University of Steubenville Facebook page shared an article from the aptly named Crisis magazine, penned by FUS Professor Stephen Kranson, wherein he provided a shocking apologia for rape culture and blamed sexual harassment on immodesty and the sexual revolution. I won’t directly engage the scandalous article here, but Rebecca Bratten Weiss provides an excellent rebuttal. The sharing of this article received such a severe backlash that FUS took it down and posted an apology claiming they didn’t really... Read more
It is bitterly cold in Steubenville. We won’t see the other side of freezing for a week, and then it’ll likely dip down several more times. It’s going to be in the single digits all weekend. It’s never a good time to have to spend the night without adequate warmth. But right now, here in the Ohio Valley, people could easily die from the cold. The Friendship Room is open 24 hours during the winter months, to shelter people who... Read more
Apologies for the radio static, my friends. My chronic illness is apparently not Catholic and decided to crash land me in a post-Christmas fatigue and head fog spiral even though it was only December 30th. I’m beginning to get better now. Might even make liturgy as early as Sunday. I’ve been bedbound or couchbound without the attention span to read books for 120 hours now, so I’ve been puttering online to keep sane. I’ve played many games of Tetris while... Read more
You know those memes that are going around: “Comment and I’ll write how I would introduce you in a novel?” I shared one to see what would happen. A lot of my friends wanted to play. I think I was just supposed to write a one-sentence description and leave it at that, but it didn’t seem enough. Also, I’m a more than a bit of a science fiction geek. If you told me in undergrad that I’d someday be living on tips blogging... Read more
Last month, I posted a guest post by a dear friend of mine, about her spiritual abuse at an Orthodox monastery associated with a group known as the Ephraimites. The post got moderate attention at first, but then a month later it was discovered by a supporter of the Ephraimites, and the combox exploded. He verbally abused my friend in several different comments and made a fool of himself. Thankfully, this person was shouted down and refuted by several Orthodox people,... Read more
You meet the most interesting people on the internet. Yesterday I was discussing common misconceptions about food stamps with somebody in a public thread, when the thread was crashed by a woman who claims she volunteers at a crisis pregnancy center. This woman had all kinds of incorrect notions about food stamps and the people who have to use them to stay alive. I’d love to get into all of her blunders in that thread, but I need to focus... Read more
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