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What Difference Listening Makes
A Summer Storm We had arrived at the apartment complex just ahead of a summer storm, complete with threatening sky, swirling winds, and an electric charge in the air. With hot wind and the beginnings...
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Coming Home, a Parable
Very Much in Love A couple was very much in love. Like most lovers, their life together was a story deeper than it was long. Every couple knows the steps. The fascination. The slowly shrinking orbit...
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Laughing at Prayer
Arson Jesus This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The setting was simple enough. For three years now, I’ve been part of a Christian Life Community small group. Once a week, we gather in a sweltering...
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Another Word for Friend
“You two are so good together.” In the summer of 2000, two fourteen-year-old kids got thrown together on one of those ragged, sweaty, summertime basketball teams inhabited by incoming freshmen. The two...
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Responding to Senselessness Redux: Damn This
Damn This. Damn this. God, damn this. Damn this to hell. Damn the fact that the news site in front of me says that 20 children have been shot to death. Damn the fact that I can’t decide whether my...
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Predicting the Pope, or Vatican Paging Nate Silver
Who’s next? Upon learning that Pope Benedict XVI will resign the papacy later this month I took the only logical step: I visited the 21st century Delphi (ahem, the twitterverse) to see what the Oracle...
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Finsternis, or Into the Depths
Finisternis Who taught you to go deep? Who dared you to crack open the secret vaults of your heart? Who stood by as you crept hesitatingly into the silence? Who showed you the way? *** My own responses...
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What’s Next?
Good Question. The best story I read this week about moving on had to do with high school basketball tryouts. As it turns out, last week was a pretty full one for stories about what happens next. The...
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A Pope Prays, the Digital World Pauses
During Election, an Argentinian Flag w/ Rosary It was this afternoon’s bizarre combination of ancient pageantry and 21st century technology that caused my most meticulously-laid-plans to go haywire....
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What’s So Weird About A Jesuit Pope?
In a word, everything. Nobody Expects… It took approximately 8 seconds after they announced the name “Bergoglio” for my phone to blow up. “A Jesuit pope?” read the text. “I thought that wasn’t...
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Worth Reading: When the Beautiful Game Turns Ugly
Italy is burning You might have missed it because you’re not a sports fan generally. Or you might have missed it because when you see headlines about soccer, your mind reads,...
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“Rockstar” Terrorist: On the Rolling Stone Controversy
Public opinion exploded this week over Rolling Stone magazine’s decision to publish a closeup photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19 year-old who allegedly conspired with his deceased brother Tamerlan to...
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L.A. Plague Squirrel and Cultural Memory
So the Black Death hit SoCal. Sort of. Stock footage of squirrel Over the last few weeks, media outlets worldwide have reported that parts of the Angeles National Forest in Los Angeles County were...
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Atheist Admires Pope Francis. So What?
It’s not uncommon for my various social newsfeeds to look like an avalanche of news about Pope Francis; it’s an occupational hazard of (i) being a Jesuit and (ii) knowing a lot of Catholics. However,...
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Tip of the hat goes to: Matt Spotts’s philosophy class at Brebeuf Jesuit, Indianapolis as well as Brian Konzman’s students on the Gonzaga College High School, Washington D.C. Cross Country Team...
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The Rhetoric of Joy: Why Pope Francis is Hearable
The Beginning of Joy Somewhere during the second year of a (reasonably successful) collegiate debate career, a teammate offered me the kind of blunt feedback that I still treasure out of that...
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In Flanders Fields
Hackness War Memorial | Flickr User B | Flickr Creative Commons “The lamps are going out all over Europe. They will not be lit again in our lifetime.” Sir Edmund Grey, the British foreign secretary...
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La retórica de la alegría: por qué se escucha al Papa Francisco
El comienzo de la alegría Originalmente en Inglés, traducido por Manuel Carrasco García-Moreno En algún momento del segundo año de mi (razonablemente exitosa) carrera en el grupo universitario de...
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Los ateos admiran al papa Francisco. ¿Y qué?
Originalmente en Inglés, traducido por Manuel Carrasco García-Moreno No es raro que mis redes sociales sean algo parecido a una avalancha de noticias sobre el papa Francisco: es un gaje del oficio que...
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The Way Women Talk?
As a high school history, philosophy, and religion teacher, I spend a significant amount of my time irritating my students by nitpicking at their writing and speaking style: Avoid the passive voice!...
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