A traditional Roman Catholic confessional looks as heavy as sin itself, the dark wood carved deep. You enter and kneel, but the kneeler never has quite enough room for your knees, which throws you off balance from the start. Velvet curtains rustle, then the metal grate slides open: God is listening. God, through […]
The fabric is Scottish broadcloth, a white as warm as the sunlit cathedral stone. The colors have the pure brilliance of the stained glass. The design is clean, strong, and radiant; I cannot imagine anything more joyful. Or riskier. In a time when many Catholics are growing more conservative, the Archbishop of Paris […]
When we moved into our house, a friend took in the black wrought iron fence, the house set well back from its perimeter, and grinned. “The Munsters.” Our haunting, though, took the form of rust. And because somewhere beneath the layers of black Rustoleum was an embossed date in the 1800s, we […]
My assignment (this was years ago) was to profile Archbishop Justin Rigali. A shy, diffident man who had zero desire to talk to the press. Frantic for insight, I did the usual sharklike circling, interviewing everyone I could find who knew him well. But the most helpful interview was with John Padberg, a […]
I feel chastened. For years I have been gnashing, fretting, and scolding about What We Are Doing to Mother Earth. My proud, smug recycling and various slight sacrifices were tiny Band-Aids of apology. I regret none of them and will continue until I die. It was the attitude, the phrasing, that went amiss. […]
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference. Who has not needed to hear those words? They were written, elegantly, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s. He was born near here, in Wright City, […]
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked. “Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge, had been chatting breezily with him about AI and the internet. […]
Scathing criticism never works for me. I listen to other people thrust and parry, demolishing arguments with rapier wit. Then I try—and fail to draw a single drop of blood. My dismissal of someone’s argument as “akin to Thomas Aquinas telling us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” […]
Last week, Christians flooded D.C. The Faith & Family Coalition was hosting its annual Road to Majority Policy conference, the nation’s largest public policy gathering of conservative Christian activists. One stump speech after another urged them to vote, evangelize, and pass out some of the $62 million worth of political literature designed to […]
“Have you ever done tarot cards?” I ask, tentative as a secret member of the Communist party in 1952. I brace for the blast; my friend trusts science, not woowoo. “I am not sure I believe in that,” she says carefully. “Oh, I don’t believe in it either,” I assure her. “I just […]
