The stock market is melting down, coronavirus is spreading its tentacles, we have in our day “no prince, prophet, or leader, no burnt offering, sacrifice, oblation, or incense, no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you”…(Daniel 3:38). Yesterday morning on my way to Mass I pulled over to the curb in front of the […]
PEOPLE ARE DIFFICULT
THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS
A RADIO INTERVIEW AND AN ADVENT REFLECTION FROM ESTHER DE WAAL’S “SEEKING GOD: THE WAY OF ST. BENEDICT.”
ON MARRIAGE: LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME
“But most vivid of all in my memory was the encounter with Dad’s friend, the Polish father from the Catholic mission at Old Mkushi. He caught me by the shoulders just as I was making my way into the garden for the photographs, as if he had an urgent message to impart. ‘The first year […]
HAPPY JULY
One of the great things about my Pasadena neighborhood is that every other block or so you come upon one of those Little Free Libraries. I am constantly returning books I’ve found in one Free Library to another Free Library (and adding new ones), trolling, and pouncing. The one up on Atchison near El Molino […]
THE ONGOING SLOGGING JOURNEY
Hey folks, my “Journey Home” conversation with Marcus Grodi will air this coming Monday, June 17. You can watch it on Monday night at 8PM Eastern on EWTN, and if you don’t have cable, you can still view it for free at EWTN.com. The full episode will then be available online–I’ll post the link once […]
MISADVENTURES AT MISSION SAN ANTONIO DE PADUA
More than 20 years ago my (now ex-) husband and I took a road trip to Big Sur, cutting off the 101 north of Paso Robles to take the scenic Nacimiento-Fergusson Road. Then newly Catholic, I swooned when we came across what at that point was the largely abandoned, picturesquely derelict Mission San Antonio de […]
BEHIND THE BULLET: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON GUN VIOLENCE
“Behind the Bullet” is a documentary, directed and produced by Heidi Yewman, with the tagline: “4 Shooters. 4 Stories. A New Perspective on Gun Violence.” Yewman is a graduate of Columbine High School and lost her former basketball coach Dave Sanders in the 1999 mass shooting. She’s since written a book, also called “Beyond the […]
GOOD FRIDAY
I am eating a large slice of three-day-old bread, sitting in my room with the fan turned up in a feeble attempt to drown out the construction noise in the apt above mine, and thinking ofChrist, scourged, bloody, exhausted, thirsty, being nailed to a cross on Mt. Calvary. I’m also contemplating how I can complete […]
ON NOISE, PART II
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” –Arthur Schopenhauer Also, Schopenhauer argued, the higher your tolerance for noise, the lower your intelligence. Piggybacking on my post of last week–because stupid people don’t think. Plus how would you like to live in this Manhattan neighborhood? Where Rich Neighbors Are Digging […]
A MOUTHFUL OF FAILURE
“Would it not be impossible for us to avoid evangelizing if the Gospel is in our skin, our hands, our hearts, and our heads? We are indeed obliged to say why we are trying to be what we want to be, and trying not to be what we don’t want to be…Clearly we have to […]
JANE BROX’S NEW BOOK: SILENCE
Jane Brox has written, elegiacally, of growing up on her family’s Massachusetts apple farm in “Here and Nowhere Else,” “Five Thousand Days Like This One,” and “Clearing the Land.” Her non-fiction book on the evolution of artificial light is the aptly-named “Brilliant.” Her newest work—fitting for Lent—is called “Silence: A Social History of One of […]
#ALLOFUS
“Unhindered by the guards, we stood by the barbed-wire fence which separated our compound from the men’s, and gazed spellbound at the long line of men who passed before us–silent, with bowed heads, plodding wearily in prison boots similar to ours. Their uniforms were also similar, but their trousers with the brown stripes were even […]
MISSION TO THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
In an attempt, to partial avail, to escape the construction noise at my apartment, I took off last week for the Central Coast. In Santa Maria I visited with my dear friends Tensie and Dennis and made an abortive attempt to purchase a cemetery plot in the adjacent hamlet of Guadalupe (that it was MLK […]
WE DREAM OF PEACE
“The logic of power demand[s] that triggers be pulled. It has no room for humanistic concerns and for the reasons of the heart. And how shall one solve this problem? How see that the killing goes on, without inner resistance, without “negative emotional reactions,” without a guilty conscience? How transform a painful experience into a […]