Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.—Overheard by film critic Pauline Kael after a screening of Blue Velvet David Lynch died five days shy of his seventy-ninth birthday, presumably from complications related to emphysema—he was an inveterate, even joyful, smoker. Inveterate might be the best word I
The feast of Pentecost has often been related typologically to the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Yet, the strange ways in which Babel and the question of linguistic multiplicity have been read by Jewish and Christian exegetes make a simple reading of “bad” diversity returning to
In 1937 a series of sexual abuse cases in Catholic institutions rocked Germany. The Nazis cleverly used these trials for their propaganda. Goebbel’s propaganda machinery attempted to portray the entire Catholic clergy as either homosexual (then still a criminal offense) or pedophiles or as financially hostile to the state, instrumentalizing
Church history is persistently a contentious affair, especially when it comes to debates about doctrine. From the Gnostics to the Modernists, these disputes get a lot of coverage in various histories of the Church. While our times have their own doctrinal disputes, we are faced with a pastoral crisis more
A Child and His Mother The redemption of suffering and the mystery of love are inseparable. The response to suffering is not to stop caring—that, in fact, is hell—but to experience a caring that sustains us in our humanity as it was meant to be. This is the redemption that