Father of Mine: A Lenten Reflection
If you grew up in an average occidental family, chances are excellent that at some point in your childhood, one of your parents threw open the door and screamed, “I’ve had it up to here with you kids!...
View ArticleReview: Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins
Whoever first compared a surfeit of fun to a barrel of monkeys and not a barrel of Catholic intellectuals can’t have read John Zmirak’s Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins. In his romping,...
View ArticleThe Crusades and Yearning for Christendom
A few days ago, my Patheos colleague Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked fellow Catholics to lay off the Crusades apologetics. The piece he links to by way of example — Professor Thomas Madden’s First Things...
View ArticleIn Defense of Cool Old Symbols
Let me begin by agreeing that it’s time for the Confederate flag to be retired from public life. At the very least it should come down from the South Carolina State Capitol building. It hasn’t been...
View ArticlePope Francis, Refugees, and the Big Levitical Beach Party
What irks me most about the guy is his grin, which is roguish, the mark of a born schmoozer. In my world, if you’re a Somali refugee and you want me to give you a cigarette or buy you something from...
View ArticleIn Paris: Christ Crucified or Avenging Angels?
In the fall of 1914, the Welshman Arthur Machen published a short story titled “The Bowmen,” which ascribes a supernatural cause to the German setback at Mons. Just as the Germans are about to overrun...
View ArticleContra Mindy Selmys: Anger Isn’t Always Hatred
In Mesa, Arizona, three days after al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, an armed man walked into the grocery store owned by Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh, and shot him dead in the mistaken belief...
View ArticleJean Ousset: The Wit and Wisdom of A Wingnut
In the days before e-mail, dashing off a few words to a friend or a newspaper editor could mean receiving a classic in return. In the theological realm, the New York Sun editor’s assurance to Virginia...
View ArticleA Humble Plug for Refugees
Last night in a Facebook PM session, my friend Mohammed told me that he recently overheard his kids arguing in Turkish. His son’s nine, his daughter, I believe, is five. They’ve been living in Turkey...
View ArticleISIS Should Get Its Own Patheos Channel
ISIS’s magazine, Dabiq, preaches mainly to the choir. As Robert Evans observes in Cracked, its copy is clogged with jargon and Scripture. “Most articles,” he writes, “start with a solid two or three...
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