The Dispatch
The Amazon Indult?
Many of us thought we were going to be safe from papal off-the-cuff remarks last week since the Pope and Curia were on their annual Lenten retreat. No such luck as we got treated to […]
The Dispatch
The pain of two fathers: A review of “The Shack”
MPAA Rating: PG-13 USCCB Rating: AIII Reel Rating: (3 out of 5 reels) I first read The Shack soon after it reached its zenith of fame in 2009, on its way to 10 million copies […]
The Dispatch
The Cross is the doorway to communion with God
Readings: • Gen 12:1-4a • Ps 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22 • 2 Tim 1:8b-10 • Mt 17:1-9 “Life is short; death is certain,” wrote Blessed John Henry Newman, “and the world to come is everlasting.” […]
The Dispatch
The perfect prayer for Lent
The best sort of Apostolic Exhortations are the shortest. Such as this one from St. Paul: “We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, cheer the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient with all. See that […]
The Dispatch
Stop beating Around the Horn: An open letter to ESPN’s Tony Reali
Dear Mr. Reali, When I first saw the headline to your March 4th article—“I’ve worn ash on my head on ESPN for 16 years. This year was different.”—I was both curious and mildly optimistic. I’ve […]
The Dispatch
Going red for International Women’s Day…and its useful idiots
The ability of the communist left to consistently dupe an ever-wider group of suckers never ceases to amaze. It’s practically another constant of the universe. I wrote a few weeks ago about the now-infamous Women’s March, a […]
The Dispatch
Panhandling and the Pope
Have you ever struggled with what to do when you encounter a person on the sidewalk of a major city or standing at a busy traffic intersection with a cup in hand? Have you given […]
The Dispatch
A new Lenten discipline
For Lent 2016, I adopted a new Forty Days discipline in addition to intensified prayer, daily almsgiving, and letting my liver have its annual vacation: I quit sports talk radio, cold turkey. This was not […]
The Dispatch
No Country for Old Mutants
The X-Men film franchise has included some significant hills and valleys, high points and low, over the last 17 years. It has produced some greats; X-Men 2 comes to mind as probably the pinnacle. There […]
The Dispatch
Love is both tolerant and intolerant
Every community, inevitably, has a value or set of values that it considers fundamental, some basic good which positions every other claim to goodness. For most of the modern liberal democracies, for example, freedom and […]