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June 2013

June 09, 2013

A Visit to “The Great Gatsby’s” Valley of Ashes Today

Anyone who's seen the newest incarnation of "The Great Gatsby" starring Leonardo DiCaprio, or read...

June 07, 2013

Jim Gaffigan, hipster Catholic

From Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post comes this profile of funnyman Jim Gaffigan: Gaffigan...

May 2013

May 31, 2013

My American Idol

It’s a weird thing to do, but I have to start this post on the...

May 29, 2013

“A Light That Is Well Placed Does Not Repel Others…”

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Strange Gods, the first book by our...

May 28, 2013

“The Great Gatsby” as sermon

From the canny mind of Fr. Robert Barron: Fitzgerald saw that, given the breakdown of...

May 18, 2013

Our Pope, the Page-Turner

Pope Francis has sparked a mini publishing boom. And recently I looked at three new...

May 17, 2013

All That Jazz: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Wound Up in a Catholic Cemetery

Some days back, I wrote about the Fitzgerald grave, which rests just outside the church...

May 10, 2013

“Gatsby,” great and otherwise

With all the attention being lavished on the new adaptation of "The Great Gatsby," I...

May 06, 2013

Man spends four years writing out the Bible by hand

Wow: A man in upstate New York has just about finished a task that was...

March 2013

March 04, 2013

How is Catholicism like politics?

E.J. Dionne has some interesting answers in the Washington Post today, and draws insight from...

February 2013

February 16, 2013

What about the pope’s last, unfinished encyclical?

His planned trilogy on the theological virtues will remain, it seems, incomplete. Catholic News Service...

January 2013

January 11, 2013

Yes, it’s still Christmas

The lights are still ablaze in Princeton, New Jersey, where I stepped into St. Paul's Church...

January 07, 2013

“Hungry” gets a little buzz

A few weeks back, I posted on the collection of homilies to which I contributed,...

December 2012

December 21, 2012

Has fiction lost its faith?

That's the provocative and sobering question that headlines this essay by Paul Elie in the...

December 10, 2012

From the land that gave us Shakespeare…

...comes this: EL James's best seller Fifty Shades of Grey has been named popular fiction...

December 05, 2012

Meet the deacon novelist

Details, from Arkansas Catholic: In "I Hear Your Heartbeat" Deacon Larry Hatch's recently released first...

November 2012

November 27, 2012

Day’s days: her diary reveals a spitfire saint

I'm working my way through Dorothy Day's diaries, collected in "The Duty of Delight," and...

November 09, 2012

Obama, Palin, Jobs and the Beach Boys enter Bartlett’s—and there’s an app for that

Check it out: The 18th edition of the venerable reference work has just been released,...

October 2012

October 30, 2012

“Hungry and You Fed Me”: homilists for the homeless

Looking for preaching ideas for next year? Look no further. I'm honored and humbled to...

September 2012

September 27, 2012

Rising after a fall: a deacon’s ministry to those with spinal cord injuries

With football season here, now is as good a time as any to take a...

August 2012

August 21, 2012

In the e-mail: on vesting a deacon for his funeral

The following e-mail arrived Tuesday afternoon: On July 31, 2012 one of our deacons, Deacon...

August 16, 2012

Gone with the windfall: Margaret Mitchell heir leaves estate to Archdiocese of Atlanta

This is huge, courtesy the Georgia Bulletin: The Archdiocese of Atlanta has received a substantial...

August 09, 2012

“Same Call, Different Men”

This sounds like something to put on my "must-read" list. From U.S. Catholic: Same Call,...

August 06, 2012

What St. Therese can teach deacons about the chalice

Last year, I posted an item by Taylor Marshall on the unique relationship between...

July 2012

July 11, 2012

Jenny McCarthy’s “Bad Habits”

This little piece of publishing news first made headlines last fall, when literary lioness Jenny...

June 2012

June 11, 2012

How Sargent Shriver planned JFK’s funeral: “He enacted his faith…”

Just in time for Father's Day, Mark Shriver has published a memoir about his father...

June 04, 2012

Vatican warns: book by American nun on sexual ethics could cause “grave harm to the faithful”

Details: The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned June 4 that Mercy...

May 2012

May 30, 2012

“If she could not have joy, she was determined to have light…”

Years ago, when the great Harold Ross was editing the New Yorker, he'd pore over...

May 14, 2012

Judging a bookstore by its covers

My blog neighbor Nancy French visited a bookstore in Tennessee the other day and got...

May 07, 2012

Creating an Arctic bible: how do the Eskimos say “desert”?

Here's something the original authors of sacred scripture never had to think about: Later this...