Category: America Magazine

When Lent teaches us what it means to be abandoned

They say that God never answers “no” to a prayer. His only answers are “yes,” “not yet” or “something better.” I believe this, in theory, but in practice, “not yet” feels much worse than you would expect. You understand the justification for waiting: If we force events that are not ready, things may go terribly wrong, and who will be there to save you then?

But that does not make the pain any less. There is no escape. You still have to labor the long way.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Photo by Nicolae Rosu on Unsplash

Knowledge should make us humble, not impatient

Check out the epistles, written to Christian communities that had already been catechised: Half of these letters have the very distinct air of a fifth-grade teacher whose class has no idea how to do long division even though they just spent the entire month on it, but darn it, she will go ahead and tell them again because that is what she is here for.

That is what we are all here for. If we know something good, we have to tell it over and over and over again because God knows we needed to hear it more than once ourselves.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image: Jaysin Trevino via Flickr  (Creative Commons)

The case for accepting disorder

We will never get to the bottom of it. One virtue most modern people could stand to cultivate: looking in the mirror, seeing our vices, our virtues and our sweet, melancholy, guilty entanglements—and simply shrugging. Let God sort it out.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine here.

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Image by Aristocrats-hat via Flickr (Creative Commons)

WONDER is sappy and predictable. Take your kids anyway.

When the dog died, I said to myself, “They are gonna run out of trowels if they keep on laying it on this thick.”

It’s not really a spoiler to reveal that the family dog dies halfway through “Wonder.” There can be no true spoilers in “Wonder,” possibly the most predictable movie ever put to film.

But that’s okay. It doesn’t set out to be Chekov. “Wonder”has a simple, specific goal in mind: to remind children (and adults) that kindness matters; that people are not always what they seem; that we all need mercy sometimes; and that strength and goodness ripple outward. And it achieves that goal.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Movie image: www.wonder.movie

When it comes to holidays, the Catholic Church has all the chill

Let’s listen in to one happy household, where young wifey is hosting the big event at her home for the first time and her mother-in-law remarks, her voice rapidly rising to an incredulous shriek: “You put nutmeg…in your sweet potatoes?” Everyone knows it was infallibly established during the Ecumenical Council of Our Family and Your Family that if more than three micrograms of nutmeg are found to be present in the entire meal, including appetizers you snuck into the garage but we saw you, the whole holiday shall be declared invalid and we will have to have it at Arby’s next time. That is what this family has come to! Nutmeg, indeed. Anathema!

Gesundheit. And score another one for the church.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image: studio tdes via flickr (Creative Commons)

WWJD about AI? Be more human.

All of humanity needed help. All of humanity cried out in earnest, “I want to die!” And He responded. He saw history as a whole, as a single story of humans warring hard to blot ourselves out with whatever technology we could put our hands on, from the stick Cain used to bash his brothers head in, to the lithe, latex limbs molded with precision by the techs at the RealDoll lab. He saw us and He conceived the strange and fearful answer: to become more human.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image by Edgarodriguezmunoz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Say it again

She was once brilliant (quantum-physics-as-a-hobby brilliant) and startlingly witty, with no time for nonsense. But now she has Alzheimer’s, and all she has is time and nonsense. Now she says things like, “I can use that for a sunapat. Sunapat with a T. I don’t know, I’m falling out of a tree.” Her nonsense often has a desperate, frustrated air, as if she knows people don’t understand her and she needs to try even harder to get her message across.

But I did hear her, when she could speak. I did hear her, when I did not even realize I was listening.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Photo via MaxPixel (public domain)

Elder brothers and elbows

Christ freely chose to pour out his lifeblood for the salvation of that frivolous young punk, mankind. Far from resenting us for receiving such a lavish, unearned outpouring of the Father’s mercy, Christ’s perfect love made Him rejoice to personify that mercy, even as he bled.

And yet. Christ is our brother. I don’t know what to make of that elbow nudge, that insistent reminder that he is right next to me.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

The wheat and weeds in my heart

I was startled to realize that even some of the things I think of as wheat are really weeds.

What kind of things? Righteous indignation that goes on too long, feeding on itself, delighting in itself. Vigilance that turns into paranoia and unseemly scrutiny of friends. An important political argument that takes so much time and energy that I have nothing left for my family. Whistling in the dark that finally stops hoping for comfort and starts revelling in the darkness.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Why you should care about gluten-free Communion—even if you eat wheat

After watching many secular media outlets butcher these very ready facts about gluten in the Eucharist, though, and after seeing educated Catholics retreat huffily into their corners, I began to wonder if I have a dog in this fight, after all. Maybe we all do. Because maybe this is not the first time we’ve seen some version of this fight.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.