“Are we having fun yet?” has become a common means of asserting: no, we aren’t.
As whining goes, it’s light-hearted enough, but I can’t help thinking the question and its unstated answer expose a deeper cultural complaint.
We want to have fun, and considering the leisure time and pleasurable pursuits available to us, we should be having it. But we aren’t.
Never are we more certain to fail at “having fun” than as the Thanksgiving-Christmas juggernaut approaches.
I...
Remember Carnac the Magnificent?
He was the recurring character on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” who could “magically” divine the answers to questions before they were asked.
“Shovel-ready projects,” he might have said were he here today.
Then his side-kick might open an envelope to reveal the question, “What do we all become at the end of our lives?”
The late columnist William Safire once penned a hilarious column about the jogging craze when it first came into...
Fifty-three years ago this month, Pope Pius XII passed away.
On the 50th anniversary, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, celebrated Mass to mark the occasion and gave a thoughtful homily.
A noble tribute to possibly our time’s most maligned man.
A great man, hailed as a hero in his time—personally responsible, in the estimation of Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide for the rescue of some 860,000 Jews during the Nazi persecution of Europe—has been defamed in death as a coward or Nazi...
One steamy day the summer of my 12th year, I sought refuge in the cool basement of my childhood home and spent an afternoon devouring Felix Timmermans’ The Perfect Joy of St. Francis.
Since Mom is an evangelical and Dad is Jewish, I’ve no idea how this book came to be on our shelves, nor do I recall what attracted me to it. But three hours later the myth that Catholics don’t believe in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ was shattered forever in my mind.
My path to Catholicism...
Our nation’s economic crisis has provoked some interesting commentary, and not only in the political realm. I’ve heard more than one pundit observe that the nation’s financial hardship has a silver lining. Comparative poverty is going to force us to re-evaluate our priorities. We’re going to learn not to be so materialistic.
Christianity is the religion of hope, able to draw good from evil circumstances, so there’s something to the idea that collective belt-tightening could have...
We often hear stories of nice girls corrupted by Hollywood, but rarely of reversions to being nice girls.
Here’s one such story, brought to mind by a recent re-viewing of “The Fountainhead.”
It stars Gary Cooper as the uncompromising architect Howard Roark. His leading lady is Patricia Neal, in the film that made her career though it wasn’t technically her debut.
Her performance was fine, though the film is quite campy and the character of Dominique Francon I find ridiculous,...
Shortly before Christmas one year, we took our kids to the battlefield at Yorktown.
There's an enormous earthwork on the battlefield site, dug by Washington and his men to give them the high ground for a siege. It was fortified during the Civil War, but otherwise remains as it was.
You can't believe people moved that much earth without benefit of a backhoe.
Even more astonishing than creating high ground by hand, however, is the poverty of condition Washington and his men endured....
Where is beauty more likely to be encountered today: in a movie theater or in a Church?
A longstanding criticism of contemporary Christianity is that it has abdicated its understanding of the power of beauty. And since beauty may be the only argument for God people of our time are actually open to, that means we are largely failing to tell the Christian story to the world.
In fact, as screenwriter and Pepperdine University professor Barbara Nicolosi-Harrington argued in an interview last...
It might surprise the New York State legislature, fresh off its legalization of same-sex marriage last week, to know this isn’t our first national debate about marriage.
In the 19th century, Mormons in Utah forced a different debate. The Supreme Court upheld a ban on polygamy in 1885 with these words:
“Certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the...
I made the command decision last month (Hubby was bound to his office, so he had no say) that the kids and I were neither going to the pool all day nor staying indoors lounging (the default holiday postures), but going to the National Memorial Day Parade.
This news was not met with the unalloyed delight of innocent children eager for a patriotic outing, but rather with the highly alloyed, indeed jaded, protest of spoiled kids who can't face heat, humidity, effort, or time away from their...
