One of my favorite parts about my life is that I never, ever, ever fly anywhere. The highest I get off the ground is when I have to hop a little bit to reach the smoke alarm that goes off when dinner is ready.

The last time I flew, it was when my husband and I decided to take our New Hampshire-born toddler to meet her California kin. I was, of course, pregnant; there were, of course, major delays. And so our little family enjoyed the rare pleasure of unexpectedly spending Christmas eve sleeping on the floor of an airport while surly Santa-hatted flight attendants took out their job dissatisfaction on us. The baby screamed with an earache the whole time, I got just the teensiest bit...READ MORE

Unless you are woefully behind on your flimsily-researched Biblical exegesis, you will know that Saturday is it. The end. Finito, adiós al mundo, ka-blammo. The end of the line.

Yes, yes, I realize that the so-called “Jimmy Akin” already covered the story about the scholar who has predicted that the end of the world will be May 21, 2011. What can I say? The man calls himself an apologist, and yet somehow fails to grasp such a simple concept as figurative language. For instance, when Christ says, “Listen, this here is actually, literally, super-de-really my body, and when I say that, I mean that it actually is actually my actual body”—well, that’s what we call a “symbol.”

But when Peter...READ MORE

I really enjoyed this commonsensical piece, “Other People’s Money,” from the Wall Street Journal. The author is “caught” by her father squandering money on individual apples. She asks:

[A]m I profligate? I don’t think so, but Wall Street’s crisis—itself following a surge in gasoline prices and a downturn in the economy—seems to have everyone turning a judgmental eye toward spending habits, their own and, more righteously, those of others.

Finding herself under scrutiny, she reflects on how her she does arrive at her sometimes inconsistent financial choices—and how she judges other people’s choices, too:

In my head, I construct entire budget plans for friends. If they would only quit...READ MORE

Guess what? I’m having a baby. Yes, another baby. Why? Because once you find something you’re good at, you stick with it.

Congratulations are welcome! Comments of “Die now, mindless breeder” will be dealt with appropriately. My baby, God willing, is not going anywhere, whether you approve of this pregnancy or not; so if you say something nasty, you’re just making me all the more determined to improve the world with even more pretty babies. So there.

Nothing, one would think, could be more personal than the choice to conceive and bear a child. And yet, as grand multiparas well know, simply leaving the house with more than two or three children is perceived as a challenge, a circus, a...READ MORE

When you pray, who are you praying to?

For pagans, that can get sticky—don’t want to make Odin jealous by sacrificing too many goats to Heimdallr!—but for Catholics, the answer seems pretty simple: We pray to Mary or another saint to intercede for us, or we pray to God. There is one God, and he always hears our prayers.

But what is God like? Now is when I wish I could just throw out pictures I grabbed from around the internet, because I’d love to illustrate this point. When you say your evening prayers, it’s just you and God in the room. But is it you and the Good Shepherd? You and the almighty judge? You and the suffering lamb? You and Yeshua the ironic rabbi? You and the Ancient of...READ MORE

Now that There Be Dragons has hit the theaters, secular audiences are reeling from the shock of learning that Opus Dei admits members with a normal amount of melanin. It’s true! Josemaria was a downright swarthy guy, relatively speaking.

To the sane world, this is not news. Of course Opus Dei isn’t some kind of super-secret cabal of hooded masterminds who—okay, I’ll admit I didn’t see or read The Da Vinci Code. But can I just say ... THE GUY’S NAME WAS LEONARDO. If you don’t even know that, then I don’t want to hear what you have to say about anything else, coded or uncoded.

Anyway, if all you know about Opus Dei is what you’ve seen in The Da Vinci Code or There Be Dragons, you’d either...READ MORE

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been in a fistfight. First there was the royal wedding, for which, for some reason, Catholics nationwide felt it necessary to show their colors as either pro- or anti-enthusiasm, even though the one and only type of social leper that the royal family has managed to exclude from its ranks is Catholics.

Then there was the beatification and Divine Mercy Sunday, a wonderful opportunity for the universal Church to make snippy remarks about supposedly holy people who hang around with Jews and Muslims.

Then, of course, Osama bin Laden got killed, and I wasn’t the only one who commemorated this profound turning point in history by rushing over to...READ MORE

When I read this 1997 essay about the death of Diana (recently linked at XXFactor), and I found myself nodding along. The author says that modern women’s over-the-top fascination with princess-hood isn’t just a craving for everything foofy and romantic—but points to a deeper longing:

t is the rare little girl who wants to grow up to be queen. To wish to be a princess is not simply to aspire upward, to royalty; it is also to aspire to perpetual daughter-hood, to permanent shelter. To dependency.