"When I was an undergraduate, John C. Calhoun went largely unmentioned and unthought of in residential college life. If the college had instead been named (as a puckish friend suggested) for William Barron Calhoun (Yale class of 1814, a lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, ardent opponent of slavery), nothing about the day-to-day life of the… Read More
How To Protest Better
"The [Berkeley] riot was ugly, and it helped Yiannopoulos more than it chastened him. It’s hard to imagine what the riot’s instigators thought that they were going to accomplish, but here’s one test for protest techniques that should have given them pause: Does this protest paint an accurate, compelling picture of the world we’re trying… Read More
Diversity, Leaky Roofs, And Aging Priests: The Changing Catholic Church
"The Catholic Church in America is slowly catching up with its shifting flock. The recent classes of ordinands are more diverse and better mirror the multicultural populations they will serve; painful but necessary mergers and closures are taking place; and churches are opening and expanding in the South and the West. But if Catholic Parishes… Read More
We See Through A Sonogram, Darkly
"If we develop a finer sonogram, and move up the date of a detectable heartbeat, the inventor of this new instrument won’t have created a new channel for personhood to be infused into babies, one that flows a little straighter and shorter and reaches them two days earlier. So, what can we do when we’re… Read More
Books on deck for me for 2017
Getting married meant I read a lot fewer books this year than usual. According to my Goodreads account, I read 195 books this past year (that comprised a total of about fifty-eight thousand pages). And eleven and a half of those were books I specifically set out to read in last year's Books on Deck post. (Ok,… Read More
My Favorite Books of 2016
These are my favorite books I read for the first time in 2016 (here's last year's list). Well, technically, my favorite books I read from December 2015-November 2016, since I always put this list together in time for people to grab Christmas gift ideas. And, if you're looking for other book recommendations from me, you… Read More
The Lazy Way To Fall In Love With Others
"Having someone come into my home offers me an opportunity to learn to love them better—by a process a bit gentler than aggressively willing myself to love them. Simply having someone over gives me a chance to cultivate what C.S. Lewis calls a storgé sort of love: the love born from familiarity and shared circumstances. Storge… Read More