Myth, legend, and the Bible all warn of the dangers of looking where we ought not. Those who turn their gaze in the wrong direction are cursed, blinded, turned to stone or salt, transformed into deer, and hunted down by their own hounds. Freud, the great modern mythologist, redirected retribution . . . . Continue Reading »
Essentially, this is a book about the importance of worshiping the right God: It does not quite argue that—in the immortal words of the Song of Roland—“Christians are right and pagans are wrong,” but it questions what counts as talking truthfully about God. It is an . . . . Continue Reading »
My one and only run-in with the police occurred on a hot summer night in Portland, Oregon, a month or so before my junior year of high school. My friend and I, both seventeen years old, had—like more than 44 percent of Americans in our age group—recently been introduced to cannabis, . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard Malone, sometime director of the Doctrine Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, once approached a Catholic benefactor in the hope of a substantial donation for a fledgling theological institute. “Theology!” erupted the philanthropist. “It’s theology that got . . . . Continue Reading »
When I was twenty-four, I spent several weeks sleeping on the floor of the Brussels Salvation Army, waiting to start a French course. I was on my way to mission work in Burundi. I shared a room with a half dozen other men from various backgrounds. One, named Gershom, was a Romanian Jew, who had . . . . Continue Reading »
Late at night, after the dishes have all been cleared and the kids put to bed, most of my friends cast a quick, furtive look around to make sure no one’s watching, grab their phones, slide into bed, and indulge their wildest and most sensuous desires. No, they’re not looking at pornography. . . . . Continue Reading »
In a significant essay entitled “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud wrote of “the work of mourning,” meaning the psychic process whereby a cherished object is finally laid to rest, as it were buried in the unconscious, and the ego liberated from its grip. Until the work of mourning has been . . . . Continue Reading »
There was a time when many people, at least in Europe, thought that empire was a good thing: It had ended inter-tribal warfare and brought humanitarian emancipation, modern science and technology, and moral and religious enlightenment to the benighted places and peoples of the earth. Those (like me) . . . . Continue Reading »
Flannery O’Connor argued that the separation of matter and spirit, nature and grace, was fatal to the art of fiction, which requires an interest in characters, stories, and concrete details rather than problems, issues, and abstract statements. Novel-writing, she insisted, is “so very much an . . . . Continue Reading »
The wolves behind the fence at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York, were lithe and rangy. They weren’t big. They didn’t slaver. They trotted up and down as our human guide told us charming tales of wolf-ambassadors, wild creatures who trusted their handlers enough to come out . . . . Continue Reading »
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