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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Yesterday NPR featured the “singing nuns of Ann Arbor, Michigan.” The Dominican Sisters of St. Mary have produced a debut album, Mater Eucharistiae, following on the heels of two separate albums by Catholic nuns that rocketed to the top of classical charts just this year. The sacred beauty of the music stopped me in my…

I’m determined to start looking up more. And it’s not just because Bat #2—we’ll call him “Freddie”—made his entry into my office from a one-quarter inch gap in the ceiling last night as I sat working, this after two Rid-A-Critter guys barely out of high school came and sealed up our house yesterday. (I made…

I spend part of Friday morning in the dementia unit at a local assisted living center. (Some mornings getting the kids off to school—barely— I wonder if I belong there.) This past Friday Tom was there as usual, motionless and catatonic, staring somewhere into space. It is rare that he responds to questions now. If…

All this talk about hell deserves another mental health break. Today’s comes with the serendipitous discovery that one of my favorite bands has a sense of humor. Check out the tongue-and-cheek official video for Mumford & Son’s “Hopeless Wanderer” and see if you can make out the guest fill-ins:

I’m slowly making my way through Dante’s Inferno after our time in Tuscany. Right now that means dawdling in the seventh circle of hell with avaricious money lenders—look out, Wall Street—and, not surprisingly, Dante’s hell is hot and very unpleasant. So hell was therefore already on my mind when I caught someone reading a contemporary…

By way of an update to last week’s rant about Aslan and his newly released Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, The Economist published a damning review of the book; and The Chronicle of Higher Education marshaled responses by a number of New Testament scholars to Aslan’s main claim that Jesus was essentially…

This weekend is my 20th year high school reunion. Yup. You read that correctly. I’m still in denial about it. And I do have a good excuse for not joining my former classmates in some hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, California to relive our glory days of teenaged acne, awkwardness and 80’s music, by drinking…

Maybe it’s because at 2 am last night my daughter woke me up and never went back to sleep. Or because at 2:05 am we discovered a bat flying around in the upstairs bedroom, having rather mysteriously snuck in from some where. (As I write this, the bat is still flying around in the upstairs…

Religion Today recently posted the results of a survey of Americans’ understanding of the term, “religious.” Apparently the old divide between those who define religiosity based solely on faith and beliefs (historically Protestants) and those who take the concept to mean primarily a person’s good works (historically Catholics) persists. The survey, carried out by the…

Has anyone else been annoyed by last week’s publicity tirade around the birth of Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge? I wonder if the joyous furor would have been so shrill if the new addition to the royal family were a girl? Or a baby born out of wedlock? Or an adopted son with a…
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