Musings of a Priest Falsely Accused
If the media focus on the Vatican were a floodlight and not a spotlight, it would be clear that the story of religion in free fall is cultural and not Catholic. Even in Lent, I am hard pressed to find many perks in my current state in life. As a prisoner with no online access [...]
Pope Benedict XVI leaves the Chair of Peter amid debate about what his decision means for the Church. Above all else, it is an act of fatherly love and sacrifice. We are all prisoners of our own perception. We come to just about every concern and deliberation from the perspective of our own unique limits, [...]
Resentment and retaliation are a toxic mix, concocted for another but ending up in your own tea. There’s a better way to get even, but it takes practice. About a month before Lent on These Stone Walls, we posted “What Dreams May Come: Azazel and the Pursuit of Justice.” In part, it was a thinly [...]
Reliving the past can be an obstacle to grace. The present is the only place where we can encounter God. It’s the reason we exist in the Year of Faith, 2013. On Ash Wednesday, 2012, we posted “In a City on a Hill: Lent, Sacrifice, and the Passage of Time.” It was about Lent from [...]
Downton Abbey Season 3 SPOILER ALERT! With Mr. Bates in prison, Lady Edith jilted at the altar, a Catholic conundrum, and Carson facing Downton Abbey’s first electric toaster, who can cope? You might have been on summer vacation when I wrote “Unchained Melody: Tunes from an 8-Track in an i-Pod World” last July. It was about [...]
Letters to and from someone in prison can meet frustrating obstacles, but a weekly blog post from inside these stone walls can require the patience of Job. “The truth is like a lion. No one has to defend it. Just set it free, and it will defend itself.” St. Augustine Catholic writer, Felix Carroll has [...]
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Miserables, set in the French Revolution, was really about a revolution in the human heart and a contagious outbreak of virtue. Many TSW readers know that I work in the prison library. I wrote about it in 2011 in “The Spring of Hope: Winter in New England Shows Signs of [...]
In “Nightmares and Dreamscapes from the Desert,” a TSW post during Lent last year, I wrote of a recurring dream I’ve had throughout 18 years of imprisonment. The dream had multiple variations and outcomes, all of them anxiety producing, but one version in particular seemed to be an archetype for the dream’s central plot. You [...]
Two weeks after the Newtown tragedy, the Church recalled Herod’s Massacre of the Holy Innocents at Bethlehem. Against such grief, faith is the only guardrail left. Twelve days before Christmas, a horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut took the lives of 28 people, 20 of them small children. It was an evil visited upon that small [...]
One of the most incisive TV news commentaries is the “Journal Editorial Report” which airs on FOX News Saturday nights and early Sunday mornings. Its panel from The Wall Street Journal reviews the week’s news, ending each broadcast with the “Hits and Misses of the Week.” Viewers are invited to submit their own “Hits and [...]
A Ram in the Thicket The Media Report
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