Picasso says, Inspiration exists but it
has to find us working. The more you work,
the more mistakes you make. If you make
enough of them, it’s considered your style.
Bad Dog licks killers’ bloody hands,
leaps with joy for rapists, fawns at politicians’
crooked feet. “He’s an awful judge
of character,” the owner tells kind-hearted
strangers who scuttle past
Right-wing conservative Christians who see this video may think it’s an attack on Christianity. They’re wrong. It’s an attack on hypocrisy.
What might Cardinal Dolan say to his friend Donald Trump, should Mr. Trump order the Department of Homeland Security to separate, arrest, incarcerate, and deport millions of immigrant human beings from across this nation?
IT WAS THE LATE 1930s IN GERMANY. Adolf Hitler had ascended to the chancellorship of the Third Reich in 1933.
Young prodigy. Has a way with words. Brings someone out of a coma. Preaches peace, rages against bankers, tries his hand at carpentry, sexy woman loves him, meets his friends for dinner every week, they drink wine, talk, he says smart things, then, random as the rest of us, he’s killed. Gets to ascend to heaven.
Hey, Catholics, what is it with that red heart out there
beating on Jesus’ chest like some Frankenstein
experiment gone bad
“Then they journeyed from Bethel; and when they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel was in childbirth, and she had hard labor. . . . As her soul was … Continue reading →
It may be that the love that lives within us cannot be turned toward something as large and seemingly abstract as the earth. But the earth isn’t abstract at all. Each moment is local and real and is always a place where we might begin.
What resides within Christianity… is the God-person whose life and times were radical and disruptive.
My grandmother didn’t
live to see her youngest son, my father, murdered in a Brooklyn
gutter by a fifth generation, drug-addicted, unemployed house-
painter whose ancestors were dragged here like devils in chains.
When they said the world was coming to an end,
I thought about my brother, his long limbs,
his good shoulders and thick hair, his small
white teeth, his beautiful feet at the end
of the hospital bed.
Who wouldn’t love a story about badass vigilante nuns and the end of the world?
The young blame us for everything that is wrong
with the world, as if we’d plotted it that way
just to torment them, as if poisoned
the very land we’re standing on. Some of us did.