Three Fictional Retellings of Violent Christian History
Two of them are good. One of them is not good! …Plus bonus Pope Emeritus at the end. When I learned that Netflix had made a series about a 14th-century Spanish serf who takes part in the building of a...
View ArticleDesert Hearts: I watch “The Jewish Cardinal”
Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few of them. –St Teresa of Ávila, granddaughter of a Jewish man forced to convert to Catholicism The Jewish Cardinal is a 2013 biopic...
View ArticleI Believe the Correct Term Is “Worlds War II”: Short movie & book reviews on...
Arts and entertainments from four nations caught in the catastrophe of the century of progress. Or, four very different World War IIs. First, the book: Andrzej Szczypiorski’s The Beautiful Mrs....
View ArticleMedieval Eucharistic Piety, And My Own: They Recognized Him in the Breaking...
Alongside the Crucifixion, the Eucharist–and specifically the Real Presence, the literal transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ–was one of the aspects of Catholicism...
View ArticleRaissa Maritain : Souffrance :: me : Sleaziness
Yesterday I finished Brenna Moore’s Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905 – 1994). It’s a sensitive and provocative exploration of the spiritual...
View Article“But Where Is the Lamb?”: Several Millennia of Reflections on the Binding of...
When my nephew was bar mitzvah, he chose (!) as his Torah portion the Akedah, or Binding of Isaac, Gen 22:1-19. We were talking at the reception afterward and his dad recommended James Goodman’s But...
View Article“Don’t Hide from the Sins of Saint Louis”
I’m in America: I will pour forth tears until like a river they reach Unto the tombs of your most noble princes, Moses and Aaron, on Mount Hor, and I will ask: Is there A new Torah, that your scrolls...
View ArticleI Used to Live Here: 2020 Revisits, In Retrospect
For a few years I’ve been doing this thing where I assign themes to each week, going in roughly chronological order through my life and praying a decade of the day’s rosary for that theme (for the...
View ArticleNormal Books for Mammals: 2020 Year’s Best
Nonfiction top 10: 10. Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, eds. Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 – 1980. “A 2003 article describes the Goree Girls, a...
View ArticleLike It’s My Jōb: Short movie reviews
Raging Bull: I watched this rise-and-fall boxer epic because Victor loves it so much. And it has every virtue I expected from his praise: plunging, visceral fight scenes; the inevitable, desperate...
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