He’s at it again. The same pompous gentleman I mentioned earlier today, the man who thinks that poor people spend between $30 and $60 a month on vending machine sodas, came back to the same thread with another question. He wants to know why, when an undocumented Mexican migrant with a United States citizen spouse and Natural-born American children is deported, he doesn’t take his family along to Mexico with him. And he asked it so genuinely I think... Read more
I had a run-in with an interesting gentleman just now– the kind of person you hope you don’t meet at a party. He was mouthing off about the poor. He’s one of those people who thinks that poor folks lack food because they don’t know how to manage their funds properly. According to him, poor people are really poor because they eat at McDonald’s, smoke cigarettes and get beverages from vending machines– he tells me that vending machine drinks can cost “thirty... Read more
Sic transit gloira Mundi– or, as we say in America, that was quick. The Mooch is out. The New York Times is now reporting that TV’s Donald Trump has fired Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director at the White House– firing people, as you recall, being the president’s only real talent. This occurred a scant ten days after Sacramucci’s hiring and four days after his infamous obscenity-laced phone call to the New Yorker. Amusingly, rumor has it that... Read more
Rose has a new skateboard. We found a brand new, pink and yellow skateboard on the deeply-discounted-broken-items rack at the back of Ollie’s. The only thing wrong with it was the packaging was scuffed and dirty. It was only seven dollars. Rose has been having a rough time of it lately. Most of her friends live in West Virginia near our church, but we don’t live in West Virginia yet and likely won’t until fall at the earliest– maybe much later,... Read more
We were shopping–my daughter, Rose, and I. It was the second store I’d dragged her to, on an errand four stores long. I’d promised her at the outset that we couldn’t afford toys, only school supplies and groceries. She was tired and more than a little fed up, but she was looking forward to riding and playing with the steering wheel in one of the truck-shaped carts at Dollar Tree. But when we got there, the store was crowded. There was... Read more
Apparently I have once again missed Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, the happiest week of the whole year. I don’t know how to celebrate anyway. Put up a fertility pole and sing Creighton Carols, I guess. Or put some buns in the oven. Or at least write a blog post. If you want a beautiful meditation by an NFP instructor, you should go and read my friend Sarah Babbs’s gorgeous litany. I can’t top that. If you want a lamentation about motherhood... Read more
My friend Rebecca has harvested her onions for the year. She set up a tent on her farm to keep the onions under– to dry them, I suppose, whatever one does with onions. She snapped a picture for Facebook. There were bunches of yellow onions braided and hanging on the tent poles. There was a lumpy heap of purple onions on a wooden flat in the middle, looking like a charcoal fire with onions instead of briquettes. “What’s the tent... Read more
If your plan involves knowingly endangering lives as a means to an end, then it's not pro-life, it's not Christian, and it's a sin. Read more
I was going for my walk after dark, after the heat of the day had broken. I walk past the latest burned-out wreck. I didn’t mean to walk past it, but I mistook the street numbers in the dark, and there I was. The police haven’t released the official cause of this fire, yet. They haven’t even finished their investigation; the pile of rubber-scented charcoal is still there, with an old Comcast satellite dish sitting on top of the ash and... Read more
Our old friend Deacon Jim is at it again. Jim Russell, a persistent man whom I’ve been assured has “a deep love for same-sex-attracted people,” has penned a short comedic article for Crisis magazine; the whole thing is available online, and won’t take you very long to read. In it, the waggish Deacon Jim identifies himself as a “QTBGL Catholic,” that is, a Catholic who is “Quietly Totally Believing God’s Law.” He professes to be, in other words, a Catholic... Read more
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