For most Americans, the month of September marks a turning point where the fall season is in clear sight – leaves slowly begin turning colors, the morning air has a subtle unmistakable crispness, and social media fills with friends’ shameless promotions of pumpkin spice lattes. However, I can’t help but reflect upon how empty our…
No one would argue, it’s been the season for natural disasters. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Katia struck like balls in a batting cage, wham, wham, wham. In the middle of that ferocious fortnight, Mexico suffered a gigantic earthquake. (For perspective, the San Francisco quake that struck during Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, termed…
In the middle of the devastating news coming from south Texas this week, there’s strangely been an undercurrent of goodness. An entire city virtually disappeared under water, but on the news we see nobility on a grand scale. It’s not the usual parade of human beings at their worst. Ever since Harvey made first landfall,…
This week will bring change, of the sort none of us can comfortably predict. Whatever happens on Tuesday, our nation will reap what has been sown. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora can’t stuff it all back down in the box. We’ve sown a disregard for authority; we’ll reap a lawless society. We’ve…
There’s a brittle quality about us these days. We’ve had to submit to one outrage after another, week after numbing week and the intervals between gut-wrenching ordeals are getting shorter. The life-and-death, decency-shredding circumstances that we face don’t give us a break to recover ourselves; they’re coming at us like a polluted river that’s overflowed…
“Hello, friends. Are you tired, run-down, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular?” OK, so maybe the answer to all your problems is not in that little bottle. But I think a lot of us really are tired, run-down and listless. Or angry, stressed and resentful. Fearful, anxious and isolated. Hey… it’s tough…
Ideologues in our culture drive public discussion like they own the car. So just on principle, I refuse to write about the current turmoil-du-jour, The Bathroom Wars. Instead I choose the topic of modesty. modesty, adj. That looks like two different kinds of modesty: ego modesty and body modesty. Let’s begin with ego modesty, the…
After Mass on Sunday (January 3), a friend said, “Well, I’ve already failed at my New Year’s resolutions. What a relief! Now that’s done.” It’s become a sort of a necessary burden, to make New Year’s resolutions. That’s why I’ve waited a few days to talk about the New Year’s schtick… resolutions, goals, intentions, whatever…
