2011-08-12
Date:
Friday, August 12, 2011
Selling Our Souls
Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age. The excitement of...
Exit Strategy
The drawdown of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, announced by President Barack Obama on June 22, is fraught with uncertainty and risk. In a country where armed...
Death & Taxes
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, he left behind the fragments of an unfinished novel, tentatively titled The Pale King. Searching the writer’s...
Protecting Religious Freedom
The Catholic Church is strenuously—some would say obsessively—opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. How persuasively is the church making its case? Is...
An Oasis
By the time Ali (not his real name) reached Azerbaijan, the most difficult part of his long journey was supposed to be over. He had left his father, wife, and one-...
An Unimaginable Intimacy
One early morning not long ago I woke with a strange physical sense of myself as the product of eons, rather than my usual tired twenty-first-century self. In the...
Language, liturgy & baseball
Levels Of TranslationRita Ferrone’s critique of the new English translation of the Roman Missal (“It Doesn’t Sing,” July 15) is an expert reflection on its...
Channeling the Sin-Eater
If, as Samuel Beckett wrote, all poetry is prayer, my devotions began in earnest thirty-some years ago when a habit of reading poems begat the practice of writing...
The Sin-Eater
Argyle the sin-eater came the day after— a narrow, hungry man whose laughter and the wicked upturn of his one eyebrow put the local folks in mind of trouble. But...
Argyle’s Retreat
Great hosts of basking sharks and shoals of mackerel, like breathren in the one Creation, swam together in the seas around Loop Head Point, free of those long-...
Argyle in Agony
Some sins Argyle couldn’t stomach much.Sins against virgin girls and animals, women bearing children, men gone blind from all but self-abusive reasons gave him...
Breaking News
If you took the DNA of the movies Broadcast News and The Thirty-Nine Steps, added a pinch of Mad Men mystique, and mixed it all together in an art deco cocktail...
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