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Okay, when I was looking for a saint for today, I almost passed on Blessed Franz here. The photograph that was used for him showed him in a German military uniform and—well, you can imagine how poorly that reflected on Franz. But it turns out that there’s a reason he is often shown wearing the […]

Another entry which is nothing more than a story idea: Another story idea—A professional young woman (say about 30) meets a young college student (about 20). Becomes “involved.” Explore problems of such a relationship. Perhaps we will give the woman a roommate as a foil. This seems barely baked as ideas go. I never did […]

Today being the feast of Saint Norbert, I headed up to Northbrook for their 8.15 Mass. It was moderately attended, sans music and there seemed to be no mention of the fact that it was the parish’s patron’s feast. I suspect, given the fact that the parish’s full name is Saint Norbert–Our Lady of the […]

Yesterday, I accidentally did a saint for June 5th instead of June 4th (thanks, Wikipedia for updating on GMT instead of local time). I suppose I should do a June 4th saint today, but I decided to just google Saint of the Day which turned up Saint Boniface, a Benedictine monk who was martyred trying […]

I wasn’t able to find any real information about this Vietnamese martyr online, beyond the link to a general wikipedia article about Vietnamese martyrs which only said that he was a Vietnamese priest. My old parish in California had a sizable Vietnamese community which seemed almost like a separate church within the parish. Unlike the […]

I got a bunch more work done on the novel this month, getting two new chapters completed and most of a third chapter written this month. On the short story front, I finished a draft of a new story which got workshopped just before month’s end, did revisions on three short shorts and put them […]

At least in part because Christianity has been centered on Europe for the largest part of its history, the canonized saints tend to be white Europeans, so it was a bit of a delight as I looked through my resources for today to discover a saint who isn’t white, Charles Lwanga. A convert to Catholicism […]

St Eugene is an interesting figure in that he was a pope elected while the previous pope still lived (his predecessor having been deposed by the emperor over one of those abstruse matters of doctrine—does Christ have one will or two?—that most contemporary Christians likely never think about and if they do, are as likely […]

Surprisingly, there is no Saint Justin church in the archdiocese of Chicago, so today doesn’t have an obligatory church visit (and yesterday’s visit covered my Sunday obligation so I’m good for the weekend). St Justin, commonly known as St Justin Martyr, is so called because, not surprisingly, he  was martyred for refusing to sacrifice to […]