Just another writer
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Father Chris
It’s kind of fashionable to write off Catholic priests as reactionaries and/or child molesters and/or hypocrites. And doubtless there are many priests who fit into one or more of those categories. Chris Ponnet, though was not one of them. I first met him on a Sunday morning in 1990 when I went to a Mass…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Queen of All Saints
For All Saints Day, I went to Queen of All Saints Basilica on the far north side of Chicago. Queen of All Saints is one of three minor basilicas in the Archdiocese of Chicago, a title which, as near as I can tell, means that the church is quite attractive and entitles the clergy to…
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Writerly resolutions: October status
This is a truly lousy month for writing progress. Even though I took a few days to take a mini-writing retreat at a hotel an hour away, I got very little writing done. My sole real accomplishment on the novel was doing some post-workshop revisions on chapter six (and workshopping chapter seven last night). My…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: National Shrine of St Jude (Our Lady of Guadalupe Church)
For the feast of St Jude, I really had no choice but to go to the National Shrine of St Jude since it plays a central role in my story, “St Jude’s Medallion.” Of course, I’d never actually been there and relied on photos online for that story. The church is smaller than I had…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint John Brebeuf
Thanks to having a spreadsheet with every parish church in the Archdiocese of Chicago along with the dates of the feasts of their patron saints, I would guess that I am one of a very small number of people who are aware that two of the churches in Niles have saints with the same feast…
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“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story
I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent…
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A visit with my younger self: 19 February 1989
I was still homeless and hanging out on campus because I was part of our Model United Nations delegation to the Harvard Model U.N. conference. At this conference, the Vatican delegation was represented by students from a seminary in the Boston area and I found them to be fascinating, thus the following: Story idea: Catholic…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: St Hedwig (a day late)
Once again, I forgot to actually write up my visit to a church on the day it happened. St Hedwig is the sister church of St John Berchmans in the two-church St Carlo Acutis parish that I visited on Sunday. But where St John Berchmans is a restrained church (designed by a protestant architect I’ve…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Teresa of Ávila
St Teresa of Ávila was my parish for a while around 2001–2 when I was involved with the music ministry for a while there. Add in that the feast of Saint Teresa is on my birthday and even though today was the first time I’d been to the church in almost a quarter century, I…