Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Henri Nouwen, Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy. Those are my answers when people ask me, knowing what they do about me, why I became Catholic so late in my life. In fact there are many answers to that simple question, but one of the quickest ways to say what I mean is simply by making a short list of some of the people who I want most to be like. If you want to know who I am, ask my friends. But if you want to know who I am becoming, ask my heroes.
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“Short Term 12,” The grace you give may be your own.
Sammy is a pale and furious vision. He is shirtless, young, scrawny and utterly enraged. He shrieks as he runs toward the small white gate that serves as the thin membrane between Short Term 12 (his group home) and his ridiculous idea of the life of an autonomous child. He is ferrel. He is angry. He is, as they say, “throwing a fit.” He is also dead in his tracks, suddenly caught, held down and screeching. For a while he flails like a fish on sand but only for moments. It subsides while you watch. Mason asks him if he almost has it out of his system, which is clearly…
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Making Sense of It All. How Advent confronts us in the wake of tragedy.
When tragedy hits, we ask why. It is visceral, perhaps even instinctual, and almost involuntary. For the past 48 hours I have mostly sat quiet in my house, mostly alone, listening to people process an unthinkable event, a moment of real evil. How did this happen? How could this happen? Thankfully one of my friends just said it outright, “How can there be a loving God in a world like this.” We want to understand, we want to explain, at least in hopes that we can make this happen less often. We dwell on the moment, on the suffering, and ask ourselves, “How can this make…
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What are you waiting for? What Advent can do to fear at the end of the world.
I am an overly cautious driver to begin with, so when I know I am in the Texas hill country at night, and I have already seen 3 deer carcasses that day and five times as many deer warning signs, It is all I can do not to slip in a paranoid hawk-like state seeing antlers around every bend that actually just aren’t there. In this country you have to anticipate Bambi if you want to make sure you keep safely on the road without a set of antlers wedged in your grill. But, as I mentioned, I am an overly cautious driver, which means I do not merely adjust…
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Holding Carlos’ Hand: How to let grace cross your threshold on world AIDS day.
For some people AIDS finds it way into our lives because of friendships. For me, there was one friendship which found its way into my life because he had AIDS. That friendship changed the face of God for me forever. In 1989 I was working on a movie when I met the first people I had ever met who were living with AIDS. That fall the university I attended gave me the right connections, permission, and $500 to start a ministry volunteering at a local hospice, Ariel House. It was there I met Carlos.
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Five Counterintuitive Things to do to Perfect Thanksgiving.
Be Alone. Thanksgiving is a good day to be together and it is an important day to be alone. The pressure of guests and kitchen can make it difficult to really find the deeper levels of gratitude without a little silence or at least quiet. Be especially kind and help make sure your spouse, friends, kids and others get time to leave the house and go for a walk. Be present today to yourself and to God so you can be present to others.
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An Incensed Pacifist and the story of the Chickens
Another guest post today from Tarah Van De Wiele, an amazing theologian and Biblical scholar living as an ex-pat in England. You can read more about her and her adventures and her adventures living outside the U.S. at ever popular blog: 2 People, 2 Dogs & 10 Bags. I am a pacifist. But historically I am an incensed one. This is why it has finally become dire that I expend the energy built up inside me from the endless culture wars that inform our language, plague our dinner tables, and crawl across the TV screen like some bug you can’t seem to swat away. Are you pro or anti? Red…
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Taxes, Caesar and Living Like Hobbits: Jesus’ take on the Culture Wars.
Here is a guest post in our series on the culture wars from a friend, one time fellow barista, and former student of mine, Fr. Matt Boulter. More about Matt can be found at his blog: Religiocity. In about the year 6 AD in ancient Palestine, with winds of revolution blowing in the air, a Jewish militant called Judas of Galileerose up in defiance of the oppressive Roman government, at that time brutally plaguing the Jewish people. In his revolutionary zeal Judas does three things: Rids the Temple of Gentiles by force. Preaches for people to forsake Caesar in favor of hi view of the Kingdom of God. Calls Jews…
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Bumper Stickers Don’t Change Hearts, and Other Reasons the Culture Wars are Hurting Everyone.
What good are bumper stickers? So far in my life I have never seen anyone pull the car over and say to the passenger, “You know what? You CAN’T hug the world with nuclear arms, can you?” or, “I just visualized world peace and it was awesome.” They are not really arguments, let alone compelling ones. Bumper stickers don’t really change people’s lives. Nevertheless it is nearly impossible to go anywhere for a short drive in just about any town and not see the simple black “W,” a Shepherd Fairey, “Hope” illustration of Obama, a name followed by a “2012,” or a pithy statement about how just such-and-such a…
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Sit with the Surprises: How finding out you are wrong can bring you great hope.
I was terrified the first few times I went to confession several years ago. I mean, I had grown up in a church that really didn’t like the practice of making confession at all. In fact they thought it was a bad thing and defied one’s personal relationship with Jesus. We kept a lot of things private back then. So most of what I thought confession would end up being was based on bad scenes from movies that made priests look either like bitter curmudgeons with a bone to pick or like sick, judgmental voyeurs. Nevertheless, I felt like this is something I needed to do and wanted to do.…
