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Many women on social media suspect one new Taylor Swift song could be about miscarrying a child. The song entitled, “Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” moved countless women to share stories about pregnancy loss on social media. Swift’s lyrics discuss an undefined loss that makes her “sick with sadness.” She says goodbye to an individual she never met, but was “more than just a short time” and “should’ve been you.” October is also Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Here’s the song below: [embedded content]Click here if you cannot see the video above. Countless women responded to the song on social media with their pregnancy and infant loss testimonies. Here’s what some women said below: YouTube user Stephanie Strangegirl wrote, “I was supposed to have twins. Only one survived. I carried a...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 25, 2022 The reluctance of bishops in the twenty-first century to excommunicate is understandable even if it may not ultimately be healthy. Our culture is extremely uncomfortable with the concept of authority. This is actually a serious problem in egalitarian societies, which have generally lost the understanding of authority as something conferred by God. It is a paradox of modern bureaucratic states, for example, that we follow more directives, rules and procedures than ever before based on our conception of “The State”, but we have lost all sense of authority as residing in particular persons. Obviously this was not as much of a problem in societies accustomed to authoritative differences based on birth and class, which for ...

Notre Dame’s first three open causes for canonization were a trio of headline-making priests (two of whom were eventually made bishops). But perhaps the most impressive Notre Dame man being considered for Sainthood was not a priest, an alumnus of the University, or even a high school graduate. Mercifully, holiness is not contingent on worldly credentials, and Servant of God Columba O’Neill (1848–1923) reached his heights while mending shoes and handing out Sacred Heart badges to generations of Notre Dame students. Born to Irish parents in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, John O’Neill (his name before entering religion) had two club feet and no real access to medical care. Nobody expected him to be able to walk, but John and his four older siblings were coal miner’s kids and they knew how t...

Share Hardly a day passes without hearing the lament from cultural curators about our diminishing abilities of attention. We are bombarded with more information about our lack of attention than ever before, including studies measuring how many seconds of attention span we have lost since the turn of the twenty-first century (down from twelve seconds to eight) to articles claiming that Covid-19 causes mental exhaustion which reduces our ability to concentrate. As classical educators, we are reminded daily of our ongoing battle for attention as we wade through Boethius and Shakespeare while our students daydream of YouTube and TikTok. We know our work involves a transfer of knowledge and inculcation of character, but inspiring and motivating our students’ effort in their own human formation ...

Happy Friday friends, I don’t know how your week has been, but in my house, our daughter has become so fixated with a picture book called “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” that I have begun reciting a nonsense litany of animals under my breath like some kind of monastic prayer. I don’t really understand children’s mental development, but it is beyond me how teaching her about brown bears and yellow ducks – alongside purple cats and blue horses – will help her to understand the world. It seems like a recipe for giving her an expectation of surrealism in the world. Come to that, maybe it’s not such a bad teaching tool after all. Anyway. It has been another big week in the news, and we’ve got a lot to get through. But before we do, just a reminder that you really should s...