I went looking, but I couldn’t find the paper I wrote in college called, “Migrant Farm Workers and Wandering Jews,” comparing the lives represented in Tomas Rivera’s The Searchers with the Jewish people scattered across the globe. Like the dispersed Jews, the migrant farm workers share a faith and a history, a mindset that connects […]

Graham Greene actually worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone during World War II, so he had some real life experience to back up his stories of Africa and espionage.
In The Human Factor, Agent Castle spent some time in South Africa, but now he’s back home in London, working in an intelligence office […]

When we’re talking about Africa, we can’t forget the European imperialists, spreading their white fingers across the dark continent. Graham Greene is one of my favorite writers, his works adventuring across many continents, including Africa.
Having been raised Catholic and turning away from the Church in my adulthood, I am intrigued by Greene as a man, […]

In Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, Lissie is an old woman who tells stories of her past lives. Although she has lived in the southeastern United States all her life, many of her memories are from Africa.
She remembers living in the African trees in one of her earliest incarnations. She remembers living on […]

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit […]

Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, created new worlds and new languages, and popularized the fantasy genre of fiction, but he was also proud to call himself a Catholic.
And if J.R.R. was alive today, he would probably be among those enraged by the chocolate Jesus. I wonder which would be more offensive to […]

My man often asks me, “If you went to church every Sunday as a kid, how come I know more about The Bible than you do?” The answer is simple to me. It’s because I was raised Catholic. Here are the facts:
1) Church was meant to teach us self-control and obedience. The idea was to […]

I loved The Brothers McMullen. With its indie appeal, the acting is crap, but the dialogue is brilliant. Ed Burns beautifully captures the Catholic American dilemma, reconciling American culture with sin and guilt, using religion as a motivator, an excuse, and the basis for some really screwed up logic.
The youngest brother, Patrick, is so afraid […]

I always watch Edward Burns movies because there’s just something about him I love. And the way he pokes fun at Catholic-flavored wrong-headedness is plain adorable to me. One of my favorite exchanges in She’s The One was near the end of the movie where Ed’s character says something like, “But you don’t even believe […]

Have you heard of this thing called “cringe therapy” wherein people dig up embarrassing things they wrote during adolescence and publish them in a book or read them in front of a crowd of drunks? Well, I’m not sure what’s therapeutic about it, but the idea is most intriguing.
So, I went looking through my old […]