No one will bear witness for the witness. — Paul Celan, poet and Holocaust survivor “To believe” has thus a twofold reference: to the person, and to the truth: to the truth, by trust in the person who bears witness to it. — The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 177 Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz … Read more
There is much talk of the possible canonization of one of Catholicism’s favorite “secular saints,” G. K. Chesterton. Inevitably, people point to one thing that doesn’t sit well in the American consciousness: Chesterton was fat. I hear little buzzings about it all over, and the subject of gluttony vs. abstemiousness comes up repeatedly as … Read more
I have a few — okay, more than a few — macabre interests that reach back into my childhood. One of them is an intense curiosity about fatal infectious diseases. (I blame early and frequent viewings of Little House on the Prairie, which seemed to have an epidemic threat each season.) I spent some time … Read more
In 2003, I discovered quite unexpectedly that I was pregnant. I was in the middle of my course work for my Ph.D., so we weren’t yet “trying” to get pregnant, but it has a way of happening in a marriage. We were overjoyed to discover the positive pregnancy test — but things quickly went wrong … Read more