Months ago, I somehow got in an online argument defending the sacrifices Roman Catholic priests make for their parishioners. At one point, I mentioned the amount of time devoted to hearing confessions. At this point, a woman on the thread as much as laughed at me through the computer. She insisted that Roman Catholic priests … Read more
I once took a Soviet film class where we were introduced to the brilliant propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein and the later films of “the thaw.” The “thaw” period in the Soviet bloc was marked by films that included elements or subjects no one would have dared touch just a few years prior. What was one … Read more
Like many, I first encountered St. Therese of Lisieux on a prayer card. I was a kid and felt fascinated by a saint who did not look much older than I. I read her words about wanting to shower roses from heaven and kept the prayer card tucked into the mirror on my bureau, peeking … Read more
Last May, Dr. Kathleen Levinstein, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, wrote a heartbreaking piece about her autistic daughter, a teenaged girl who became convinced that she was really a man trapped inside a woman’s body. With encouragement from transgender activists at the local organization of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends … Read more
Tucked away in a central Parisian museum that was once a railway station, there hangs an Easter painting quite unlike any Gospel masterpiece created before or after it. It is not painted by a Rembrandt or a Rubens or the patron saint of artists, Fra Angelico. The painting is the work of a little-known Swiss … Read more
“Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” So wrote … Read more
The past four years have witnessed a battle between different generations of Catholics in public life—Generation X Catholics have taken a very different path from Baby Boomer Catholics and those born before the boomers. Generation X Catholics have emerged prominently in the Republican Party. Many who were mentioned this year on Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential short … Read more
When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, most of the young women I knew took birth control pills for medical reasons as instructed by their gynecologists. Now that I am in my 30s, I am encountering women who are only just discovering that they never really needed to be on the Pill in … Read more
2007 saw a flurry of secular films that were unabashedly pro-life in their outlook, even when they were far from family fare. Movies such as Waitress; the raunchy, R-rated Knocked Up; Bella; and Juno all achieved measures of success with mainstream moviegoers, from the little independent surprise Bella (which was marketed to church-goers) to the … Read more