I used to be a big fan of the Catholic League. When I was a naive and bookish homeschooler, I read their journal Catalyst. I admired their work in defending Catholics from defamation and mockery. I assumed they must be right about how downtrodden we are. I had never been out in the big bad world where Catholics suffered so much hardship and taunting, but I presumed it did exist. I even wrote a term paper on anti-Catholic bias in the... Read more
I have a friend who really wants to get a message out to everyone, about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Ksenia posted this to her Facebook today: I keep seeing things saying if the ACA saved you, you should share your story with people to motivate them to save it. But I am too exhausted now. I’ve been sharing for months and now I’m just too tired and scared. And it seems like they don’t care anyways. So the... Read more
I just got done with the 25th anniversary edition of Joan Wester Anderson’s Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors.  I’d never read the original volume; this one has been updated with several new stories and a retrospective by the author. Where Angels Walk is a long compilation of stories, obviously mostly unverifiable, by people who have experienced angelic intervention in their lives. Some of these people are famous: Corrie Ten Boom, Saint Pio and Mother Angelica make appearances. Many... Read more
Let it never be forgotten that last night, Buzzfeed of all places published a great big dossier of as yet unverified reports alleging that the president-elect, Television’s Donald Trump, had been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin for at least five years due to Putin blackmailing him. This report was long– thirty-five pages long. There was lots in it. It was almost immediately challenged and suggested to be a fake. I don’t know which end is up with that and perhaps I... Read more
Yesterday, sometime before the internet explode with urine jokes, the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof was sentenced to death. I don’t need to familiarize anyone with Mr. Roof’s act of terrorism. He murdered nine people at their Bible study, because they were African American, and Mr. Roof hated African Americans. He thought they were violent and dangerous to whites. He chose this particular church, in Charleston, because it was “historic,” and because at one time Charleston had the highest ratio of blacks to... Read more
A woman froze to death today. She was homeless. She’d been evicted from her low-income housing for being more than two weeks late to pay $338 in rent. The landlords told the news that she’d violated lease in several ways before they threw her out for not being able to pay $338 in rent. They weren’t specific about what she did. Perhaps she was on drugs. Perhaps she struggled with her mental health. Perhaps she was a nuisance. I don’t know anything... Read more
Last week I read my very first Remnant article, and I didn’t quite like it.  I resolved not to read things that bothered me so often, and moved on. But then several of my friends were sharing another Remnant article around Facebook, and I found myself reading this. The article in question is published on a Remnant newspaper blog called “Fetzen Fliegen,” which according to my research is a German idiom meaning “to quarrel with someone harshly.” It’s penned by a... Read more
I am not a very tasteful decorator. I have neither the knack nor the funding. I like aesthetics and the study of art, but as far as how to translate my book learnin’ into the world of home decor, I couldn’t say. I don’t have any furniture in my creepy old rental house that isn’t second hand; half of it I dug out of the garbage before Bulk Pickup. I regularly look at the “certified dank” houses in mcmansion hell and... Read more
It just might have come to your attention that TV’s Donald Trump is walking back his famous claim that he is going to build a wall across the Mexican border, paid for entirely by Mexico. To wit, he’s now saying that “Congress” will pay for the wall. And by “congress,” of course, was meant taxpayers. Trump came back later with a tweet explaining himself, which I quote directly from his infamous Twitter feed: “The dishonest media does not report that any money... Read more
I just got back from a pilgrimage, and found that Father Mike Scanlan was dead. My Eastern Catholic church’s catechism students took a trip to see the relics at Saint Anthony’s— the first time I’d been to a Latin church in six months. And it is a very Latin church, Italian-looking, a huge claustrophobic stone rectangle hung wall to wall with in glass cases, each case in turn full of reliquaries, each reliquary containing a piece of a saint. There were... Read more
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