Tag: family
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The Pope Is Not the Church
I like the new pope—more than I expected, at least. But even so let’s remember: The pope is not the church. It’s going to be very tempting to forget this fact over the next few days. The pundits, Catholic and otherwise, have been rapt in the suspense of awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis. We…
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Sentimental Repression
It has been a welcome relief from the busy romantic adventures of a single fellow in his mid-twenties in New York City, with my cellular phone by happenstance out of commission, to indulge in a reverie of reflection. Its occasion—in addition to the missing phone—was the discovery of Mark Greif’s challenging new essay at n+1…
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Have You Heard of Rashi?
The day my essay, “The Self-Thinking Thought” appeared on the New York Times blog Happy Days, I received a letter that went thusly: I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting. Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry? What do you know about Rashi, the great…
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Seeing Home
I keep seeing license plates. Only certain ones, only ones from places I’ve lived before. Who knew that Brooklyn had so many cars visiting from Virginia? The other night I saw Rhode Island. And I never see anything else—not Connecticut or Jersey, or Pennsylvania or any other. I certainly never notice New York plates. The…
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Calling Farm Animals!
In the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I’ve got an essay about this wonderful new organization co-led by my friend Aaron Gross called Farm Forward. Though they’ve already done a ton of work on a shoestring budget, just last month they officially launched at the Tribeca penthouse of Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha. What…
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Population Bombs
Population was to the 1970s what climate change is to today. Academia was in a frenzy, governments dragged their feet, and disaster seemed unavoidable anyway. The Al Gore of that period was Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford who wrote the mega-bestseller The Population Bomb. After the mass starvations he had imagined for the…
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Were Things Really Better Then?
Passing by a front porch sale in my neighborhood this afternoon, I turned around my bike, stopped, and picked up (for a quarter) a little book called The One Hundred and One Best Songs. It is a songbook from 1922 published by The Cable Company of Chicago, “makers of the famous Cable line of pianos…
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A Questioning Teenager
For the last few months I’ve been playing around with this article for a popular (and rather self-helpy) religion website. The editor has stopped returning my messages, so I figure the deal is dead (this happens sometimes). So I sez to myself, why not share it with my Row Boat friends? It is more of…