I wanted to like MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend better than I ultimately did, since Rachel Bertsche makes a persuasive case that we need more archetypes of adult friendships. Unfortunately, although I feel like Bertsche and I are working on the same project, generally, I never wound up caring very much about her specific project. Bertsche has the goal on going on 52 “girl dates” in a year, in the hopes of finding a new best friend in... Read more
When I was in church to celebrate the feast day of Saint Maximillian Kolbe (who has previously been one of my saints of the month), I tried to reflect on his life and his example during the moments of silent prayer in the liturgy. In those moments, I asked God to strengthen my will, and make it more like his. This is one of those prayers that I wind up frequently making whose fruit tends not to be in having... Read more
— 1 — When I was in school, it wasn’t uncommon for my teachers to have access to smart whiteboards and computers, but it was seldom that there seemed to anything useful to do with them. But dy/dan, a math teacher and blogger, has a great project for students, where they designed their own vases and then tried to plot the rate at which the water level would rise in their classmates’ designs. Reading his post makes me want to putter... Read more
I’m at First Things today, discussing the unpleasant rhetoric that still surrounds the United States’s torture program, and the way the President managed to acknowledge its existence while minimizing the gravity of the abuses: As the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program comes closer to publication, truths are finally being extracted – not from suspected terrorists, but from publishers and politicians. The New York Times announced last Thursday that the paper will finally drop the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” in favor of “torture” to... Read more
Less than an hour after I wrote yesterday’s post on patience, I was at Daily Mass, and, during the prayers of the people (a moment in the liturgy when the whole church prays for specific, spoken intentions, and people meditate on their own, private petitions), I had a particularly uncharitable kind of prayer come into my mind. It was, in fact, an unpleasant enough thought, that I almost expected Anya (the wish granting demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer pictured above)... Read more
There’s been a (possibly apocryphal) story flying around the interblags about a confrontation between a man and a child. In the anecdote, the man is waiting in a long line at a Burger King and becomes more and more frustrated with the tantrum-throwing child in line behind him, who kept shrieking for an apple pie. So, when he finally got to the front of the line, the man bought all of the apple pie snacks in stock, and lingered to watch... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. We’re nearly at the end of the “Letters to the Seven Churches” section of Pope Francis’s book, and most of the letters discussed have had an air of fraternal correction. However, this week’s letter to Philadelphia and the discussion that follows is pure... Read more
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the Mass of Solemn Profession of twelve of the Dominican Friars at DC’s House of Studies. This is the moment where they make their permanent promises to remain in the Order. Earlier in their formation, they make temporary vows to live in community, under the community’s rule, but, when those vows expire, they’re free to go, unless both they and the order would like to see them become a member of the community... Read more
— 1 — I’ve gotten to coast on my university’s JSTOR access for alums, but the NYRB has an interesting proposal to make research journals accessible to anyone: The entire system of communicating research could be made less expensive and more beneficial for the public by a process known as “flipping.” Instead of subsisting on subscriptions, a flipped journal covers its costs by charging processing fees before publication and making its articles freely available, as “open access,” afterward. That will sound... Read more
An atheist friend of mine recently posted the following question to Facebook (and gave me permission to reprint it here): I don’t think I grok forgiveness in the absence of Catholicism. I keep trying to imagine what I might mean if I asked someone to forgive me. I certainly wouldn’t ask anybody that they purposefully have poorly calibrated beliefs about me, or that they have emotions poorly calibrated to their beliefs. The best I’ve got at the moment is “please... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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