January 22, 2024

I’ve been thinking about conservatism today. It started when I saw a tweet from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation: “Governor DeSantis has an extremely bright future in the conservative movement. While we all rally around our movement’s leader—President Trump—we also know that the future of conservative policies will be in how effectively we implement Trumpian conservatism. There is no one, other than President Trump himself, who has done more in that regard than Gov. DeSantis, so I... Read more

January 21, 2024

  I hope I am never so old that I don’t love the snow. Last year we barely had any snow at all, and this year has still been far too muddy. Christmas and New Years were a gray mess. The past ten days were promising: a dusting here, a dusting there, and because it was so cold, it piled up. I went for walks in my neighborhood and felt the ice crunch under my feet. And on Thursday night, it... Read more

January 19, 2024

[I wrote this short story in 2017, but a lot of the links to the second page in my old two-page posts are broken now, so I’m publishing a revised one-page version here.  All persons trying to find a moral in it will be drug out into space and zapped. ] “Are we going to Polaris?” asked the old woman across the aisle. Why anyone would want to get off the bus on Polaris Parkway, I didn’t know. There’s not... Read more

January 18, 2024

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

January 16, 2024

  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

January 15, 2024

  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

January 15, 2024

  [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

January 14, 2024

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

January 12, 2024

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

January 11, 2024

  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


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