October 6, 2024

  A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark: The Pharisees approached Jesus and asked, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?”  They were testing him. He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?”  They replied, “Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.” But Jesus told them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment.  But from the beginning of creation, God made them... Read more

October 5, 2024

  Autumn has a smell before it has a look. When the trees are still mostly green, dried out around the edges but not in glorious color yet, you can smell the change coming on. It smells like honey when the ground is wet, and brown sugar when it’s dry. It finally rained good and hard last weekend, but now it’s bright again. The nights have been a little chilly, and the days just cool enough to make walking pleasant.... Read more

October 2, 2024

Donald Trump is completely insane. In case you haven’t guessed, this is my weekly election politics update, which I actually haven’t written in more than a week. I try to write about the pro-life movement and Ohio politics separately, and just have one snarky post about the week’s political news, but I’ve been putting this one off because I wanted to wait until after the vice presidential debate this evening, in case anything interesting happened there (it did not). Please... Read more

September 30, 2024

  How do you get rid of Serendipity? I’m not asking some kind of philosophical question; I’m talking about my car. I was hoping to sell what’s left of that thirteen-year-old Nissan I so comically named Serendipity: a car with good brakes, great tires and and a shiny frame, which sometimes jerked when I hit the gas and smelled suspiciously of mildew, with a dry rotted wiring harness hidden under the heat shield and a host of junkyard parts I... Read more

September 29, 2024

Thank you to the readers who asked if we were okay in the rainfall after Hurricane Helene: we’re fine; it didn’t hit my part of Appalachia at all. All we got was some much needed rain, and I felt guilty. Appalachia has different regions just like every other part of the world; I live in the very top of Northern Appalachia, across the river from the chimney of West Virginia. That part wasn’t hit at all, though there are a... Read more

September 27, 2024

September wasn’t an easy month, but we ate well. We almost didn’t because things have been so difficult. At the beginning of the month we were still behind on rent and in serious trouble, but thanks to a series of lucky breaks, we broke even at zero about halfway through, and then we had to put every penny towards trying to replace my catastrophe of a ten-year-old Nissan– and we’re still not quite there yet. I wondered how we were... Read more

September 25, 2024

  The first gasp of Autumn is not color, but drying up. September is the drying up time of year. It’s not colorful and beautiful Autumn yet. It’s the part of Autumn where the trees start to look exhausted and dusty. I desperately want to go for a hike out in the woods, to see the dusty trees before they change color. Hiking is how I breathe. It’s absolutely vital, and I’ve been without it for three months. At this... Read more

September 25, 2024

I want to talk about a couple of important articles I read recently, and the backlash they got, and what it has to do with pregnancy and defending life. My friend Rebecca Bratten Weiss recently wrote a really good article for U. S. Catholic, where she laid out the case that Kamala Harris, while certainly not pro-life, has a policy approach that is in better alignment with a consistent life ethic than the Republican platform. And remember, I insist that... Read more

September 25, 2024

  The State of Missouri killed an innocent man today. There is a host of evidence that Marcellus Williams was innocent. The prosecutor’s office asked for a new trial when DNA testing suggested he was innocent. One prosecutor admitted he’d struck a juror from the pool merely because he was Black like Marcellus was. The murder victim’s family asked that the sentence be changed to life in prison, but the governor refused clemency. Killing him was too important. The governor... Read more

September 22, 2024

  I’d like to draw your attention to a very important piece of reporting I’ve been privileged to experience ahead of time. This new podcast is a deep dive into the People of Hope Catholic Covenant Community. Please have a listen to the first two episodes of the “Shadow of Hope” podcast series, which just dropped today. Karen Ann Coburn has created an eight-part series, and she was kind enough to let me listen to these two episodes in advance.... Read more


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