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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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“That’s the point of the gospel…”
So long as I’m on the topic of “purity culture” and its truly unholy rhetoric about women and sexuality, here’s a must-share video that relates a particularly horrifying iteration of the “damaged...
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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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7 Quick Takes—7/19/2013
— 1 — First and foremost: ironists rejoice! For students of literature—and all pedants everywhere—someone has finally fixed Alanis Morissette’s totally un-ironic song “Ironic.” If you haven’t already...
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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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7 Quick Takes—07/26/13
— 1 — I can see the bottom of my bedroom closet floor! I realize that this is hardly news in the life of most folks, but I’m not most folks when it comes to cleaning. (I’ve written previously about my...
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On quitting as a form of starting
A couple of weeks ago, I stopped running. I had made it through three of the four short running segments that were meant to make up that day’s run-walk; but, when I started the fourth one, I dropped...
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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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7 Quick Takes, er, Quotes
I’ve been MIA on the blog for some time now (though, on the plus side, I have managed to finish my dissertation prospectus, and I’m halfway through a draft of chapter 1!). But while I’ve been...
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Veni Veni Emmanuel
Tonight is the Eve of the First Sunday of Advent, which is also my first Advent since entering the Catholic Church. It’s a time to reflect both on the ways that God has come into my life and on the …...
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In case you’ve never thought about the connection of Socrates and Dorothy Day…
You should totally watch this lively talk that Cornel West gave on Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker in NYC: Meanwhile, I would happily listen to Cornel West read the phonebook—and every time I see...
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