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My Abortion Story
Note: My apologies for the long post. Some stories just don’t tell short. The “Prelude” to my story is here. The most remarkable thing about the day that I discovered I was pregnant was that it hadn’t...
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Losing Heaven and Earth: A Review of Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”
I really wanted to like Terrence Malick’s latest film To the Wonder, which was met with mixed reviews among critics but received a particularly strong and tantalizing review in America. Like many...
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Confession and the End of Catholic Guilt
I’ve always loved Woody Allen films because I always identified—more than I’d like to admit—with Allen’s neuroses, anxieties, and performed guilt. There’s a memorable and witty exchange on guilt...
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Why Bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
No one wants the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston Marathon bomber. While a funeral director has agreed to bury him, no cemeteries will take the body. Even though some individuals have...
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Sex, Shame, and Purity Culture
For most of my life, I’ve felt like I had two choices when it came to expressing my sexuality: I could be a dirty (as in sinful, impure, unwanted) girl or I could be a dirty (as in sexy, desirable, …...
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7 Quick Takes—05/17/13
— 1 — The “weirdest conference ever” seems to have been ripped right from the pages of a Thomas Pynchon novel. If you’ve ever read Pynchon’s fabulously surreal and satirical The Crying of Lot 49, then...
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Three Ways of Looking at a Mess
The Apartment There are several reasons why I live alone—as an only child, I intensely value my privacy and personal space—but one reason is that I’m messy. Not “leaving the dishes from tonight to do...
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7 Quick Takes—05/24/2013
— 1 — The interwebs have been all aflutter of late over Pope Francis’s statement that all are redeemed. HuffPo (in)famously seemed to spin this as an endorsement of universalism, the belief that all...
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An Old Soul
As an only child—and a homeschooled one at that—I was never much good at keeping the company of folks my own age. My primary circle was always composed of adults and, when given the choice between...
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7 (Belated) Quick Takes!
— 1 — First and foremost, happy Feast of the Visitation! I particularly love this feast day because the mass reading includes the Magnificat, one of the most wondrous and beautiful of all the passages...
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Our Hearts are Restless.
I should start, I suppose, by apologizing for my frightfully long radio silence here. I’ve been bouncing about the US—from Virginia to Georgia to California and, at last, back home—which hardly proved...
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Heretics and higher-ed
I’m nearly convinced that G.K. Chesterton went to grad school in the humanities in the 21st century because his introduction to Heretics diagnoses it so effectively: It is foolish, generally speaking,...
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Is there middle ground between “I’m okay, you’re okay” and belligerence?
Andrew Sullivan just posted some recent research that suggests that the stereotype of the “dogmatic, belligerent” atheist is largely false. A study from the University of Tennessee found that the...
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“I’m Already There”
I’m in the process of digitizing my entire filing cabinet (it’s amazing how many nonsense projects you devise when you’re trying to avoid writing your dissertation!) and I just found, filed away under...
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To Seem The Stranger Lies My Lot
TO seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace my parting, sword and strife. England, whose honour O all...
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On Taking Sex Seriously
For a long time, the argument about the supposedly sexually repressive nature of Catholicism went like this: Sex is a powerful, beautiful, and deeply important part of human life; to ask us to deny our...
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Committed to the Details
So, as mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure of spending last weekend at a graduate conference put on by the Berkeley Institute. The conversations and content were quite rich, and so I...
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Pray for Uganda
As you may already be aware, Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, which makes even “touching another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality” an offense punishable by life in...
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