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Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat opens, very nearly, with a familiar scenario: a dispiriting encounter between a young artist with an exacting creative vision and a conventional corporate gatekeeper with a checklist approach to what sells. The scene depicts a real-life exchange between 24-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor (played by Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter) and her editor at Holt Rinehart regarding her unfinished novel Wise Blood, which the editor wants to conform to typical literary norms. “Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” he remarks and proceeds to make the same point twice more in different words. Like a similar framing device in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, which has Jo March trying to sell a story to a hardnosed newspaper editor, this scene in Wildcat...

Last Epiphany, my wife and I had our annual debate over whether to take down the Christmas tree. She has a weird dislike of finding pine needles on the floor. I don’t understand it. She invokes the tradition of Christmas lasting through Epiphany. I argue that grace overflows the traditional rules, and that keeping up the Christmas tree beautifully symbolizes that truth, and that even as it loses its needles the lights still shine, which is a beautiful symbol of Christ living in us and shining through us even in our wretchedness. You will be shocked and saddened to hear that she did not accept either argument. I thought about this when I came across some reflections and sermons on Easter that spoke of the events reported in the Gospels as symbols of hope and happiness. These symbols seem to...

NAGASAKI, Japan — High above the city of Nagasaki, I walk a Way of the Cross in the steps of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who founded a monastery here in 1931. The lush mountainous area is marked by a grotto reminiscent of Lourdes, built by the Polish Franciscan saint to honor the Blessed Mother and sanctify the place where he lived for five years, until called back to Poland.   Americans associate Nagasaki with the atomic bomb, dropped by a U.S. B-29 on Aug. 9, 1945. In Japan, however, the region is also synonymous with Catholicism. Missionaries brought the faith to Japan’s southern ports in the mid-1600s. Nagasaki’s Christian community grew so quickly it was known as “Little Rome” among traders at the time.    A visit to Nagasaki is an immersion in Japan’s Catholic story — at onc...

In the Sunday Gospel, Jesus cuts right through the modern Western tendency to place love in opposition with law, and law in opposition with joy. Jesus joins all three concepts and summons us to a new attitude. I. Announcement of the Principle – Jesus says, As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete. Note how the Lord joins the three concepts of love, law, and joy. This is precisely the opposite of what Western culture does. The best that Western culture will admit of law is that it is a necessary evil; more routinely it is viewed as an unloving imposition b...

COMMENTARY: The April 11 statement by The National Catholic Bioethics Center affirms that ‘a partial brain death standard can never be acceptable to Catholics.’ Tremendous controversy surrounds the discussions surrounding brain death, which is the notion that when the brain is dead, the person is dead. In 1997 one of the world’s foremost brain death scholars published “Recovery from ‘Brain Death’: A Neurologist’s Apologia” (republished with updated endnotes in April 2024). In it, pediatric neurologist D. Alan Shewmon, a convert to Catholicism, documents his professional conversion from believing that brain-dead patients are dead to the firm conviction that nearly all of them are alive. (He allows for the possibility that some patients who have died from widespread bodily injury incidentall...

On the night before he died, Jesus was thinking about our joy, not his pain — and he shared a secret that we only now may be ready to understand. The Church has been looking back on that night for weeks now, because what Jesus said in his Farewell Discourse on Holy Thursday reveals the deepest meaning of what he wants us to do now, on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B. In the Gospel this Sunday Jesus spells out his philosophy of love. He says, “This is my commandment: Love one another as I love you,” and he repeats it: “This I command you: Love one another.” By making love a commandment, Jesus reveals a lot about what love is and what it isn’t. It isn’t an emotion that strikes almost at random, like Cupid’s arrow. It isn’t dependent on the feelings we have. Love is an act of the will. It ...