Musical Rosary #4–Presentation
When the days were completed for their purification according to the law of Moses, they took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord….A couple years ago I was having some kind of argument with a...
View ArticleGod Is Working His Purpose Out
Can we tell what God is trying to tell us with events in our lives? Does God use events in our lives that way?I used to be more confident than I am now that this was a spiritually-fruitful way of...
View ArticleArt as a Vocation: Gay and Catholic Book Extra!
What do we want? Eve’s book! When do we want it? …Soon! (Preorder now; it releases 10/20.)I drafted a chapter on art as a vocation but cut it because I couldn’t figure out a structure, which is always...
View ArticleWhat Whiskey Goes With Cheese?: I read “The Spectacular Now”
This is just a quick note to say that I read Tim Tharp’s Spectacular Now, the YA novel on which the movie was based, and I really enjoyed it. It’s the tale of a high-school cutup and ladies’ man who’s...
View Article“How Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art?”: The Best Essay of Its Kind
I’ve read a ton of these and Pelagia Horgan’s appreciation of Fra Angelico is the best by far. Give it time to build:The loveliest image I know is Fra Angelico’s ‘Entry of the Blessed into Paradise’, a...
View ArticleFra Angelico and the Sex-Hating Church
A really rambling post.Now that my book is out I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and in many of them I’ve been asked to tell my conversion story. A huge part of my conversion involved realizing that...
View ArticleFrom A. Bates, “Party Line”
(yes, I am reading a Point Horror ’80s paperback about a 976 teen talk line. My summer is going great)Robbie started over to the Chevy and Mark, relieved, climbed into the Jeep. He’d been hoping for a...
View ArticleReading, ‘Riting and Repentance: Some Notes from the Festival of Faith and...
at Calvin College. This was a blast, guys. Here are some semi-cleaned-up excerpts from my notes. I don’t need a literary agent. I need a literary patient. This is a great poem. “The wall comes down.”...
View Article“Free Choice Is a Lie”: I review Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel
for First Things: A Book of American Martyrs, Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about the shooting of an abortionist by a Christian “Soldier of God,” is perfectly unempathetic. Lately we’ve heard a lot about...
View ArticleNotes from a “Pilgrimage to Hostage Relics”
This past Saturday a small band of weirdos met in a park to practice our chant, then headed to the Cloisters to do some guerrilla venerating. Our pilgrimage made me think about relics; and about public...
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