“No, sweetie, I’m sure that she doesn’t want your shoe.”   The toddler sitting behind me looks unimpressed at her mother, and I am trying not to giggle. For years and years, I have listened to the same spiel about coming to God like little children. I can almost see the Gerber baby picture as they start talking about beautiful children who are sweet and precious. They talk about the absolute innocence of children. The childlike awe. The childlike grace.... Read more

Image Source:  walknboston on flickr     Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing... Read more

  Several weeks ago, I read a question-and-answer column in our local Catholic newspaper (or newsletter as I believe Catholic newspapers should more accurately be called) that explained to a curious soul that taking Communion “signifies that the recipient is a member of the wider Catholic community, united with the bishop of the local church and with the pope.”     My initial response was incredulity and then loathing rejection of his answer.  In high school, I studied the Baltimore... Read more

  What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “Traditional Femininity”?   Maybe it’s Doris Day’s 1960’s thirty-year-old chic, innocent but not naive radiance in career sheaths and adorable pillbox hat and gloves? Maybe it’s the 1950’s serene Grace Kelly with her elegant Dior or Helene Rose full-skirted gowns, heels, pearls or diamonds, sunglasses, and driving gloves. Or maybe it’s earlier. Like the 1940’s luminous Donna Reed in the more structured, Spartan wartime dress. Or 1930’s Ginger Rogers’s... Read more

  As you may or may not have noticed, I was on a lengthy sabbatical over the past two weeks.   Well, to quote an eloquent British man, “I’m not dead yet!”   This past Saturday I graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville with my Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in writing and a Spanish minor. I completed the Honors Great Books Program, I was inducted into Alpha Chi (national college honor society), Sigma Tau Delta... Read more

The Washington Examiner recently published a piece on the recent controversy over the failure of administrators at conservative Catholic colleges to respond to victims of sexual assault.   The main contention of its author Jeremiah Poff (a current student at Franciscan University of Steubenville) is that such “devoutly Catholic institutions” have not neglected to address the problem of sexual assault, but are rather “on the front lines of preventing such behaviors.”   In abstract, his argument is rather straightforward: P1... Read more

  I’ve been recently privileged to grow close to Franciscan University alumna Theresa Williams. She wrote a stunning guest contribution for The Shoeless Banshee a few weeks ago, and we have bonded over our mutual love of our Faith and of writing. A few days ago, Theresa informed me that she and her co-authors of the “Concerned Alumnae Letter regarding the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life” (which I signed and endorsed) were writing a statement to clarify recent... Read more