Despite making fun of the nature of tech company perfidy and internet culture, “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” like too many animated films, may simply add to the inability of its younger viewers to follow a story for more than a minute. I should have known. The ad that popped up for The Mitchells vs. [...]
Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were both "Godded-up" to an extreme degree, treated at various times as if they could not err, treatment that author Allen Barra thinks contributed to the fact that neither man ever really grew up. Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age, By Allen Barra [...]
The sharp focus on Mrs. Verhagen gives “The Winged Watchman,” Hilda van Stockum’s novel about a Dutch family during World War II, such power. The close-up tasks of the women are just as heroic as the tasks of the men who often fought to protect their loved ones. Who knew a great war story would [...]
We are not perfectly transformed in our minds. We are still slightly hypocritical. But Christ still calls us to speak of his mercies. Knowing our weakness, we can be gentle with others and reverent toward God, who knows our weakness and yet loves and uses us for his purposes even as he is healing us. [...]
I’ll continue to honor Lent in my heart all the year. The reason is neither “Catholic guilt” nor “Jansenism.” It is that Jesus rose from the dead so that we might imitate him, take up our own crosses, and experience truly what it means to be an Easter people, freed to love and serve God [...]
“Good Friday is not just one day of the year,” Fr. Richard John Neuhaus writes in "Death on a Friday Afternoon. " “It is a day relived in every day of the world, and of our lives in the world.” There is “no denying that the cross is surrounded by glory,” wrote Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in Death [...]
Tomie DePaola may not have been a saint himself, but he recognized them, venerated the love of God in their lives, and drew them in such a way that we can see that love shining through his friendly folk art icons. Through the Year with Tomie DePaola, text by Catherine Harmon and John Herreid, illustrations [...]
As for human institutions that have gone astray, my view is that they are only dead branches hanging on to the trees of education, religion, and society to which my real loyalty lies. I would rather the dead wood of such institutions be pruned away so that the true wood can grow. I am nothing [...]
Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend. Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose by Regina Derieva, translated by various (156 pages, Marick Press, 2019) Images in Black, Continuous, by Regina Derieva, translated [...]
Trevor Cribben Merrill’s 2020 debut novel, "Minor Indignities," is a student-centered novel set at a place that seems suspiciously like Yale in the early-mid-nineties. It's a world in which young, smarty-pants kids compare their personal libraries, think a new used bookstore is exciting, actually read books, have to open up a computer to send an [...]
Because life often comes at you very fast, the cleaning of a khaki couch, like the cleansing of Augean stables, is a task that often waits for a hero’s journey. Or at least a lot of free time. This trembling period of early Covid insanity was one such time in which I felt both impulses. [...]
Having more enemies, I believe, will sharpen my mind to the reality that in this new year I will have many fights that I must fight and also many opportunities to become perfect in the way that God alone has set out—by loving my enemies. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I rarely make [...]
Perhaps the new "Hunger Games" film's success is due as much to its realism about human nature as it is to the fact that it’s a familiar product whose origins lie in the time before the full conquering of Hollywood by wokeness. The movie critic John Podhoretz once recalled a woman coming out of a [...]
Christmas, it is said, is “too commercial,” an affair of buying and selling, deals and exchanges. It is all about gifts. It is all about materialism. It should be more spiritual! Call me a bad Catholic, but I have never quite been able to get into the spirit of this sentiment. Christmas will ever be [...]