Recently, Pope Francis gave an opinion about hell. It was a hopeful opinion, very mildly put: “This isn’t dogma, just my thought: I like to think of hell as being empty. I hope it is.” Catholics all over social media went bananas. I read “hell is empty” a thousand times in the space of an hour, but I never saw anybody fill in the rest of the Shakespeare quote “and all the devils are here!” because prissy traditional Catholics aren’t... Read more
I don’t think there’s any stopping Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination. I’ve been wrong before, but I’m beginning to think that’s true. I can’t even count the times I’ve protested that I hate politics, I just happened to gain notoriety back in 2016 as a Patheos Catholic blogger who denounced Trump, thinking it would all be over by the second week of November. I wasn’t wrong to denounce him. I was wrong that he’d disappear. My fellow... Read more
I don’t know how to tell you that it’s wrong to kill children. If you can’t understand that children in danger have to be rescued, whether they’re supposed to be where they are or not, I think you are beyond hope. I would like to think that people who call themselves “pro-life” would understand this completely, but we all know this is not the case. This is just to say that two children and an adult woman drowned in... Read more
[Note: I originally published this story in 2017, but the link to the next page in my old two-page post has stopped working, so I’m publishing an edited and revised version as one page here.] The man got on the bus when Adrienne and I did, down town at the station with nothing else around. He was about my age, careworn, weather-beaten, more nervous than I’d expect. Most people downtown look a little nervous, especially at the bus station,... Read more
I remembered this weekend that most everybody likes to know facts about the lives of saints. I’m thinking about saints all the time lately, and I keep mentioning what I’ve learned when I’m on social media. I was researching Saint Ignatius of Loyola for my Lives of the Saints project, and I joked on twitter that the cannon ball which “canonized his leg,” leading to his painful surgeries and eventual religious conversion, was the first time I’d heard “canonized” referring... Read more
It was morning, but it didn’t look like it yet. Adrienne woke me, asking for a ride to school. Usually, she prefers to get up by herself at five and take the earliest bus to have breakfast with her friends when the cafeteria opens for the day. Michael has been staying up all night some nights, to do laundry at the 24-hour laundromat and see her off to school, then making my coffee, then coming to bed after she’s left.... Read more
I have been doing a project on the Lives of the Saints. I’ll have more to say about that by and by. I have been up to my elbows in hagiographies, learning all kinds of random facts. Did you know that Saint Ignatius of Loyola suffered from gallstones and kidney stones? You do now. Did you know that Saint Teresa of Avila died just as they were switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, so she either died... Read more
Hey folks! I’m writing regularly in more than one place now and I’ve got an influx of followers on so many weird little corners of social media, I thought I would start doing a post round-up once a month to coordinate instead of just my annoying boilerplate. Later today, we’ll have a real post worth your time as well. First of all, I was honored to write two articles for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette lately, a standard informational piece on... Read more
[One day in foggy, rainy winter, here in the Ohio Valley, just at the start of the liturgical season known as Ordinary Time, I was walking through my neighborhood on a poor street. I saw some houses standing and occupied, some houses abandoned, and some that had been torn down and were nothing but piles of splinters. “It looks like a bomb went off here,” I said. And I decided to bomb it, as writers do, in a story. I... Read more
[Note: I’ve noticed that some of the links to my very old two-page blog posts from several years ago no longer work properly, so I’ll be re-posting revised and edited one-page versions of my favorite old blog posts from time to time for the next few months. A version of this post originally ran in 2017.] We went to the beach with my bad cousins. I grew up in Ohio. “Going to the beach” usually meant going to swat... Read more
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