Category: tangential
-
This Crazy Concept of Time
“Come From Away” is coming to my community later the year, and we have tickets, in part because it’s a show my daughter likes, and in part because it’s part of a package we bought. If you don’t know what the show is about, here. Have Kleenex handy. We have learned through hard experience that…
-
Fortress or Field Hospital?
I’ve been reflecting on the current stage of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church as seen through the lens of moral foundations theory, because it seems to me that one of the dimensions of dissonance in the responses of Catholic factions to what’s been unfolding since the summer of ‘18 relates to the…
-
Why I’m Staying
Last week I had planned to write about John Courtney Murray and the concept of religious freedom in American Catholic thought, as a follow up to the piece I did on Romans 13 that exactly three people read. But I wasn’t up to it. I will admit that the news from the Pennsylvania grand jury…
-
Did I ever tell you about that one time I faced a group of angry protesters?
This would have been back during the fight over the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, which my organization supported on policy grounds. It was summer, and we were, like the foolishly idealistic policy wonks that we were, trying to educate our members about what was and wasn’t in this significant piece of health care legislation, explain the…
-
My friend in Uganda
Patrick Meet my friend Patrick. Before I tell you the crazy story of how The Book of Mormon, the Catholic Church, Bob Goff and Facebook converged to allow us to meet, and before I tell you how he presented some fundamental challenges to who I claim to be, you ought to meet him. Patrick lives…
-
On Marriage
I posted this on Facebook, but then the whole Laurel v Yanny thing blew up, so nobody had time for this. I get it. Since then I’ve added a little (to make it, you know, even longer). Some of you know I play a small role in the marriage preparation process at our church. I…
-
A Personal Note
We’ve been listening to this soundtrack in our house a lot. My daughter and I are both pretty fixated on this show (I mean, in case this blog didn’t already give you that impression), and my wife likes it a lot, too, so it plays throughout the house as background in the evenings even as…
-
Passions, Habits, and the Life in Between
Take this as a giant maybe, a question to test, a hypothesis. In reflection tonight a few things struck me that, together, seem to encompass a lot of life. The first point was about passions. I was observing how someone close to me is driven by a passion, an inward drive to consume something past…
-
Why I ask Facebook for prayer intentions (and why I pray for other people)
I have two habits when I travel for work that people notice. (That I know of.) One is my out of office messages, which do not say “I will be out of the office for business from x to x and will not be checking email. Contact y in an emergency.” That is so, so…
Reading Francis 