In this installment of the “Loneliness Today” series, I would like to talk about loneliness among disabled people.[1] This is a topic that a few regular commenters have brought up in the comment sections on previous essays in this series;...
1. The title “Querida Amazonia” is Portuguese / Spanish for “Dear Amazon”–as in somebody’s female beloved, or the salutation of a letter. Oftentimes (not always), a papal document with a title in a vernacular language is meant to speak to...
My great-grandfather, Pawel Turowsky, came to the United States from the Russian Empire in 1907. Two years before, the failed Russian Revolution of 1905—harbinger of the successful Revolution twelve years later—had been brutally crushed by the Tsar’s forces. A wave...
The 1970s country-western song “Pancho and Lefty” was written by Townes Van Zandt, and is most famous in the form of a cover by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. (For what it’s worth, I personally prefer the Van Zandt original,...
January 16 brought the news that Christopher Tolkien, best known as the longtime literary executor of his father J.R.R. Tolkien, had died at his home in the South of France at the age of 95. Tolkien was born in 1924...
I’ve watched the video of Pope Francis slapping–in something of the manner of a YMCA self-defense class; his movements are a standard way in martial arts to break an unwanted grip on one’s arm–a young Asian woman in St. Peter’s...
I work as a substitute teacher at a public school district in Western Massachusetts. It’s one of the more cash-strapped districts in a relatively affluent rural area in the Northeast. In this position, I have had the responsibility to, on...
Today has brought the news that James D. Conley, Bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska and successor of the archconservative stalwart Fabian Bruskewitz in that diocese, has taken an indefinite leave of absence from his ministerial duties, due to serious mental health...
This is the first in a projected series of essays dealing with the phenomenon of “loneliness,” beginning with a discussion of the loneliness described to Pope Francis in the “youth encounter” in Tokyo, and moving from there into a broader...
Since Pope Francis’s election in 2013, a feeling has emerged that Catholic discussions about moral issues are essentially now being spoken in two different languages. There is a “Franciscan” language focusing on broad issues of what social philosophers call the...
One underreported event during Pope Francis’s recent trip to East Asia was a meeting with three Japanese young adults, who delivered personal testimonies to him. These testimonies shed further light on some of the themes of the trip overall. Such...
The Vatican press bulletin recently published a series of statistics about Catholicism in Thailand and Japan in the lead-up to Pope Francis’s visits to those countries. These statistics clarify some points that were long unclear (I’ve seen estimates of the...
Popular Posts