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Articles
Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution
In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and...
Self-Abuse
The Catholic way is to include, and then sift: wise words from a wise priest that I remembered a few years back when I was reading, in this journal,...
Satan Unbound
On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in 2021, after churches had reopened but while many pandemic restrictions remained in place, three priests in my parish celebrated...

On the Threshold: Part III
Now it was Lent, and we were just forty days from Easter. Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to...
On the Threshold: Part II
It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the...
On The Threshold
“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to...
Literature of the Word
I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once...
Going Further
A year ago, with my two small granddaughters in tow, I visited a friend in an assisted living facility. Before her stroke, Terri was a daily communicant in my...
Hawthorne’s Daughter
In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion...
Grace, Continued
Then, for three years, I traveled wherever Grace traveled. Wherever she went, I went, and after she prayed for my husband in Tarrytown, he wanted to go with me,...
Grace
. . . for he will come like a rushing streamwhich the wind of the Lord drives.—Isa. 59:19 On a hazy afternoon in late May 1986, I wait, as...

Heal Our Wounds
Six months after he was elected to the Chair of Peter, Pope Francis made one of the most provocative statements of his five-year pontificate. Asked by the Italian Jesuit...

Empathy is Not Charity
Martin Scorsese’s recent film Silence, like the historical novel by Shūsaku Endō on which it is based, turns on an act of emotional blackmail. Inoue, a seventeenth-century Japanese magistrate...
The Devil and Hilary Mantel
By now, everyone who reads contemporary fiction will have heard of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, the powerful advisor...
Look At Me
Twenty-three years ago, under the pseudonym Catherine Maurice, a woman wrote a book about recovering her small daughter from autism. Still in print, the book is called Let Me...