Many years ago I wrote a post on survey data from the Guttmacher Institute on use of Natural Family Planning. To quote from my lede: The report finds that only 2% of Catholic women use natural family planning, and that this number does not vary significantly when frequency of mass attendance is taken into account. The figure rises to 3% among married Catholic women. This provoked an interesting discussion going in several directions, one of which was challenging the numbers... Read more
Over the past year at least, we’ve heard plenty of discourse about the divisions plaguing our country. While government policies such as the end of the DACA and TPS programs threaten to break up families by deporting people for whom the US is the only home they’ve known, families of US citizens are divided by politics and ideology, to the point that people’s differences impede connection and conversation. I’m sure that many readers of this blog found the holidays difficult.... Read more
[Updated 01/16/2018: there was some bad html that was preventing part of this post from appearing. Hopefully, it has been fixed. DCU] I finally got a chance to read Angela Nagle’s small book, Kill All Normies. It came out last summer, but the library never bought a copy and I was too lazy to use inter-library loan, so my wife bought it for me for Christmas. (In passing let me give a shout out to the publisher, Zero Books. They... Read more
Being the token Catholic in my family sometimes means feeling like I have to over-explain some things. While visiting family but without much going on in the way of New Year’s Eve festivities, I opted to attend a late-evening Mass at the parish where I had attended Christmas midnight Mass. As I was preparing to leave, my mother asked me quizzically, “So, is it a New Year’s Mass?” I explained, not for the first time and with a hint of... Read more
Among the literary gems I picked up at a recent parish bazaar was a compilation of homilies by the 20th-century theological heavyweight Karl Rahner, titled The Great Church Year and organized by liturgical seasons and feasts. On Christmas Day I opened to the first entry in the “Christmas Season” section and found, at first, a rather dismal proclamation of the insignificance of the world of human activity with a nihilism to rival the Ecclesiastes. But then, in the middle of all... Read more
This is not an earth-shattering question, but I am curious: in your parishes, how long do you kneel after communion? I ask because my new parish here in Alabama seems to kneel an extraordinarily long time. In my experience at other parishes, we generally all kneel until everyone receives communion and the priest returns the sacrament to the tabernacle. Here in Tuscaloosa, we all kneel until the priest and the deacon have purified all the vessels and they have taken... Read more
Driving home Wednesday afternoon, I heard this discussion on NPR’s All Things Considered about the legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law, most famously associated with Boston’s clergy sex abuse cover-up, who had died that morning. May God have mercy on him. When the Boston Globe journalist interviewed on the program, in her summary of Law’s complicated pastoral history, described the Catholic Church in Boston during the time of his tenure as “so powerful, so influential,” contributing to his “prestigious” stature as archbishop, I... Read more
Over the past two weekends, I’ve been performing in the chorus for a Christmas concert with the local symphony orchestra. Among the many prepared remarks the director used to transition between pieces, he always commented on one particular moment during the sing-along portion of the concert, when the orchestra would briefly stop playing and the choir and audience would sing a few measures of “Silent Night” a capella. In that moment, he said, it didn’t matter whether we were male or... Read more
The special senatorial election in Alabama is over, and Doug Jones has eked out a victory over Roy Moore. This has been a painful election in many, many ways. The saddest part for me is that almost no conservatives paid any attention to Roy Moore until he was accused of sexual assault (and overall creepiness). His racism, misogyny, his anti-Islamic bigotry, his authoritarian tendencies, were just part of the package. Suddenly there was a great crisis of conscience: “I don’t... Read more
The death of Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner in September drew accolades as well as critiques from, shall we say, some rather strange bedfellows. Some on the left praised his support for civil rights (that is, he objectified black women too) and his more infamous role in the sexual revolution. From the right, an editorial in The Federalist bizarrely misnamed his sense of personal entitlement as joie de vivre and his exploitation of women as a celebration of complementarity, and excused all the ugly vulgarity of his... Read more
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