Ship of No Fools
To the guard patrolling the big parking lot at Tempe Marketplace on the night before Thanksgiving, I must have seemed less Rosa Parks than Ignatius J. Reilly. When he spotted me from his golf cart at...
View ArticleThe Pilgrimage of Dorian Gray: My First Ash Wednesday
Following the Arizona Cardinals can feel like an endless meditation on the vanity of human desire. Still, it amazes me that Super Bowl XLIII, where Pittsburgh snatched the cup from our hands in the...
View ArticlePsalms Sung Blue
In the first few psalms, God comes across like a rogue cop in a James Ellroy novel. After clearing his Son to break the nations with a rod of iron, He claims His own piece of the action by breaking the...
View ArticleAddicted to Faith Films
You’ve got to hand it to St. Augustine. In his Confessions, he records his evolution from gnostic to Christian with the precision of a dieter. Apart from a few scattered phrases, like the one where he...
View ArticleConvenience Store Apostolate
As I was walking home from Mass on the second Sunday in Lent, a woman jumped into my path, thrust a stack of CDs in my face, and offered me my pick in exchange for five bucks. YouTube having...
View ArticleLent and the Lame Evangelist
I’ve been warned that wearing a cross openly in Turkey means asking for trouble. There’s good reason for thinking so. The Republic was conceived in war – the War of Independence, in which several...
View ArticleLent for the Reluctant Ascetic
I grew up in the days before Velcro. By persisting to the age of five or six in not knowing how to tie my shoes, I drove my mother to desperate measures. One morning, she snatched the bowl of Life...
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