I’ve been obsessed with Sinead O’Connor since she tore up the pope. I wrote about her memoir, Rememberings, and the recent documentary Nothing Compares for the Century. She’s one of the most famous lapsed Catholics (another obsession of mine) but what intrigues me most is how many elements her life story shares with the hagiographies … More Desperately seeking Sinéad
I’m not willing or able to let go of a relationship as transformative as a relationship between mother and daughter. So for anyone to suggest that is a healthy thing to do, I dispute that. I also have to admit that it’s just not in my nature to do so. … More Grief and the land
I find myself repeating a prayer cribbed from Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): “Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that—make mystics out of cheeses.” I wonder if a pandemic might also do the trick. Evelyn Underhill, one of … More Covid Mystics
In my writing about faith, I’m always trying to keep my footing on the highwire. I hope that struggle speaks to people. Thanks to Sister Julia Walsh for inviting me to be her guest on Messy Jesus Business. We talked about the arts, the usual suspects (Greene and O’Connor), and the Roman Catholic Church as … More The Church as Muse
The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger was a defining moment for my generation. We remember where we were when the shuttle exploded on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. Most of us were watching the launch on live television. I was 9 years old and at home, sick with a January cold, … More Major Malfunction
There’s a word for that specific kind of longing for an earlier time—when technology held so much promise—a longing that grows from the despair at where technology actually brought us, which, we suspect, is the end of the world. That word is hauntology, and it was coined by Jacques Derrida to describe the yearning for a lost … More reading ghosts at the end of the world
I have lived in places of great natural beauty—even places that appeared, to the naïve eye, mostly undisrupted. The Gulf Coast. The Blue Ridge Mountains. The northern coast of Michigan. But it isn’t easy to find natural beauty, or any scene that might inspire spontaneous praise or pastoral poetry, in my current home. Here I … More artists and ecological grief
According to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 90 percent of Catholic sisters alive today are over the age of 60; most are closer to 80. The majority are white. Many younger religious sisters, who reflect the increasing diversity of the general population, have no peers in their home congregations. These women … More How Young Sisters Are Changing the Catholic Church
Toni Morrison said that language “arcs toward the place where meaning may lie,” but life also arcs toward language. This is beautifully explored in the movie Arrival, when a linguist’s apprehension of an alien language shapes her own experience of time. But it is terrifying when language lies, oppresses, steals, and erases—and life distorts in … More On Robert Macfarlane, and how the words we use define us
In the wake of the latest revelations of abuse in the Catholic Church, I’ve struggled with the theological writing that once inspired me and mended the tears in my fabric of faith. But I find it’s not the theologians who persuade me now. It’s the artists. They remind me why I can’t just walk away—even … More I’m with the artists
Jessica Mesman 