Years ago, I spent a month with my family in Burundi. I had once worked there when still single. During this visit, my daughter took French lessons from a local teacher in the small provincial center where we were staying. At one point, M. Jérôme, the teacher, asked her why Europeans give flowers . . . . Continue Reading »
Earlier this year, a Seattle-based journalist named Tariq Ra’ouf took to social media to explain the logic behind the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have been rocking American cities for months. “We are going to inconvenience every single person who doesn’t give a f**k until they give a . . . . Continue Reading »
On July 4, 1776, as several dozen sweating American colonists sat in the stuffy Pennsylvania State House wondering what would befall them for having dared to rebel against their king, a lone, hungry Spanish priest lay in the windswept stone plaza of a Hopi village wondering what would befall him for . . . . Continue Reading »
Our culture is full of angry women—angry at misogynist men, angry that careerism hasn’t brought the fulfillment it promised, angry that they might get pregnant, angry when they don’t, angry at toxic masculinity, angry at the mental load, angry about a whole host of grievances. In a . . . . Continue Reading »
A few months ago, I predicted that the Francis pontificate would seek to establish cordial relations with the Rainbow Reich. (See “While We’re At It,” January 2024, composed late November 2023.) In mid-December the Vatican issued the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, vindicating my . . . . Continue Reading »
How to describe what can’t beseen, invisible, yet universal,what is, has been, will always be,the Endless One, the cosmic forcewithout which nothing would exist,formlessness creating form,the mountain etched on open sky,the music score of notes and rests,silence giving shape to sound, asdarkness . . . . Continue Reading »
Before I formed you in the womb, my son,I knew you. Knew you long before that highspring day in the sixth year of the reignof FDR, when the full-leaved sycamores that frame the tired river that runs Eastsmiled on your mother—just sixteen—andyour father, twenty-one, when they cametogether . . . . Continue Reading »
You’re bound to lose: the house will always win,in time. At first, though, Fortune flatters thosewho yield to her enticements. You beginwith bits of luck, small stakes. If you propose a higher sum, she’ll play her violin,flash gold-flecked eyes, throw you a long-stemmed rose.When bets get high, . . . . Continue Reading »
now thou but stoop’st to me—Ben Jonson The falcon like a teardrop heaven criesfrom higher than the city’s tallest towerdesigned to fall precisely through clear skiesnow hurtles at two hundred miles per hourAt such a speed what keeps her flashing eyesfrom drying out her lungs from ripping . . . . Continue Reading »
The Alabama Supreme Court's decision on IVF is based on precedent and the dignity of human life at all stages, and it should be a model to regulate the fertility industry. Continue Reading »
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