Sustained by his family’s love and his love for them, Biden can carry the weight of tragedy and offer it as a gift to others. At the beginning of the book, he describes visiting the family of Wenjian Liu, a police officer murdered on duty, and offering the widow his personal phone number. He tells… Read More
Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Substitutionary Atonement
I've finished the first book on my list of intended reading for 2018! The honor goes to Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.'s The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism. I've also made a start on Middlemarch, but I'm reading it with friends, and we're not scheduled to finish till May. The next one I finish will… Read More
Speaking on my Conversion in Chicago
On February 8th, I'll have the pleasure of visiting Loyola University Chicago to deliver their annual Newman Lecture. The Lecture, presented by the Joan And Bill Hank Center For The Catholic Intellectual Heritage. The Cardinal Newman Lecture Series is named after the great 19th century English prelate who wrote very movingly about his intellectual journey toward Roman… Read More
Aziz Ansari’s hookup was a game of Russian roulette
If Aziz Ansari is reading all the thinkpieces about him, he must feel most ill-served by his allies. “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader” wrote Bari Weiss for the New York Times, exonerating Ansari in a singularly insulting way. It’s unreasonable, Weiss and others write, to expect Ansari and other men to… Read More
Asking Catholic Women About Vocations, Prayer, Confession, and NFP
I partnered with America to do a series of sidebars, looking through the data in the survey of 1500 Catholic women in America that the magazine produced in partnership with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Here are links to my four short pieces: The Prayer Lives of Catholic Women We asked women about… Read More
The couple that writes Star Wars takes together…
My husband and I enjoyed seeing The Last Jedi, and we both wrote up appreciations of the film. At Aleteia, I wrote "Kylo Ren: The Star Wars not-quite-villain whose temptations are familiar" The combination of great power and great irresponsibility would be enough to make for a challenging antagonist, but Kylo Ren is more than just… Read More
Mary McCarthy, Masks, and Identity
I read Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps, after reading B.D. McClay's Commonweal essay in appreciation of her work. This novel of linked short stories what what Barbara recommended I begin with. (I had forgotten I'd read McCarthy's The Stones of Florence). Here's one passage I particularly enjoyed: Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept… Read More
Books I Plan to Read in 2018
This year, I read all but one of the books on my Books to Read in 2017 list. Spiritual Letters by Dom John Chapman is in progress (so it doesn't have its checkmark yet), but I didn't read The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. for the second year in a row, so it's coming… Read More
Origen on “Lead Us Not Into Temptation”
The internet (and the Pope) are discussing the Lord's Prayer plea that God "not lead us into temptation" which brings up the obvious question: why would God lead us into temptation—is it a trap? It's not a new question, and, when our monthly spiritual reading bookclub picked up Tertullian, Cyprian, And Origen On The Lord's Prayer, Origen… Read More
My Favorite Books of 2017
Nonfiction about prisoners and dead bodies, just one work of fiction (alas!) about tiny dragons, lunar tipplers, and attack oragami. These were my favorite books I read for the first time this year, or, technicallyDec 2016-Nov 2017. I like to put the list together a little early each year, in the hopes of getting some… Read More