This comes courtesy of a Facebook friend (wonderful, isn't it, how the most benighted forms of technology can occasionally work to the good?). I've long been a fan of C.S. Lewis, but somehow I managed to miss the information that among all his other bits of poetry he had at one time tried his hand at [...]
Because I live in the middle of the Arlington Diocese, I have the good fortune to be able to go "Parish Hopping." One occasionally hears the pejorative "Parish Shopping," a reference to Catholics who go from church to church looking for the one most likely to turn a blind eye to their particular doctrinal or moral [...]
Every Lent I try to post these verses somewhere. They come from one of those grand old Lutheran hymns that are surprisingly orthodox in their theology. (E.g., "Now Thank We All Our God" and "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty"—and of course, we can't forget the Methodists for giving us "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and [...]
It sounds like a recipe for failure. Take a historical event (the disappearance of nine monks in Algeria in the 1990s) and base a two hour movie on it. Ensure a PG-13 rating by excluding or minimizing violence, language, and sex. Forget about the action; focus on the drama. Show Christians in an unabashedly positive, albeit [...]
Every now and then one finds a phrase, or perhaps a whole sentence, that is so terribly good, so smack on the money, that one wishes one had written it oneself. (Actually, this happens to me all the time. Sometimes I think it is admiration of another writer's talent and humility at the scope of my [...]
Mr. O'Brien and I seem to have a knack for giving each other post ideas--probably because we tend to be interested in the same things (I'm an actor/writer too). This time I was reading his comments on the James O'Keefe debate--or rather, the broader debate among Catholics about the ethics of lying. This post is not [...]
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be able to attend two performances of the Washington Stage Guild's production of G.K. Chesterton's play Magic. This post is unfortunately too late to inspire anyone to go see the play; but I suspect most Chesterton fans will still be curious to know [...]
It’s not often one sees Chesterton being performed outside of, say, the occasional private Catholic school (not often there either, I imagine!). But this month Chesterton’s dark comedy Magic is being performed at the Undercroft Theater in Washington, D.C. The production, put on by the Washington Stage Guild (http://www.stageguild.org/season.htm) has earned 4.4 out of 5 stars [...]
As a bonafide JPII baby and a long-time resident of the relatively conservative Arlington Diocese, I grew up without hearing the traditional or Tridentine Mass. I prefer “Tridentine Mass” to “Latin Mass” because having been raised in such a time and place, “Latin Mass” means something quite different to me than it does to most people: [...]
There’s something beautiful in the fact that the calendar year and the Church year both begin during the winter. Old New Year’s Day (March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation) was no bad time to relaunch. The Incarnation was, after all, humanity’s official new start date, when Adam II entered the world to repair the damage [...]
