Abel Ferrara directs LeGoef

Peter Bradshaw, chief film critic for The Guardian, viewed Padre Pio at its premier in the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. He is a perceptive writer. His review  emphasizes two things. One, the film is not a biopic of Pio’s life, as many devotees of the saint expect. Pio/LeBeouf does not appear on screen that much. Bradshaw writes that LaBeouf seems to be making what amounts to a “cameo” appearance. His role accompanies the “main action,” perhaps as commentary on it or complement to it. Continue Reading
meme poster

My essay on Shia LeBoeuf ‘s conversion in The Federalist  avoided stressing the obvious: the Latin Mass has no cure for clinical narcissism. Or sociopathy. It did not seem necessary to press the point. But judging from responses, I was wrong. More than a few readers were anxious to view LeBoeuf—actor, performance artist, filmmaker—with sympathetic trust. Some invoked St. Augustine. Clearly, the piece had been too delicate. I should have been more explicit: In his self-referential interview with Bishop Barron he impressed me more as a con-artist than a convert. Continue Reading
9/11 & The Pedagogy of Amnesia

A new generation of voters will go to the polls this year with no memory  of 9/11. What knowledge they might have of it has been given to them in classrooms sodden with ideological agendas and careless of history. Careless of the truth of things. In American Thinker this morning Pamela Geller asks:
Twenty-one years on, and where are we? What do our children know about 9/11 and the Islamic terrorists who attacked our country in the worst attack on our homeland in American history?
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Huey Newton

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool. The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. Continue Reading
America Magazine: A Sentimental Education

America bills itself as the go-to publication for “thinking Catholics and those who want to know what Catholics are thinking.” Distressingly often, the Jesuit flagship puts me in mind of the hookah-smoking Caterpillar who shouts to Alice “I’ve something important to say!” Sometimes it really does. Other times I wonder if St. Ignatius has his regrets. My wonderment spikes when the editors prod me to think deeply about the eco-spirituality of Pope Francis. Laudato Sí placed environmental issues at the heart of Christian concern. Continue Reading