“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” If George Orwell had seen ahead to today’s scramble to make black—but not white—a proper noun when referring to racial groups, he might have cited capitalization, too, as a corruptor of thought. Jennifer Harvey, evangelist for the anti-racist gospel of Ibram X Kendi, never capitalizes white but always capitalizes Black. She explains why in the introduction to Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America (2020), her child-raising manual for white parents:

This may seem to be either an unfair, or at least a grammatically inappropriate nonparallel use of racial terms.

The Rainbow, LBGTQ Catechesis, & Queering the City

Maureen Mullarkey

July 22, 2025

Graphic design is a silent but powerful language. Instantaneously recognized, a single graphic is easily digestible. It serves as a branding device for more than your afternoon cuppa at Starbucks or a Ralph Lauren sport shirt. Applied to an ideology and a movement, it simplifies everything it stands for. It leapfrogs over complexities, contradictions, and muffles the noise of rational argument. Most significantly, it conveys an identity and, with that, a corresponding ethos. Under Constantine, the Chi-Ro—standardized and emblazoned on the official banner of the Roman Empire—was disseminated throughout the known world as understood by Greeks and Romans at the time. Continue Reading

Gallows Observance in the Papal States

Maureen Mullarkey

July 8, 2025

Meet Giovanni Battista Bugatti, official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 until he retired, with a papal pension, in 1864. Nicknamed Mastro Titta—a corruption of the Latin for “master of justice”—he was the longest serving and storied executioner under papal authority. He delivered justice 516 times over the years he held the job. “With ax, noose, guillotine, Mastro Titta served the pope.” That enviable sentence is the opening line of “He Executed Justice,” an illuminating essay by John L. Allen, Jr., Continue Reading

Pope Leo’s Pentecost & the Spirit of Open Borders

Maureen Mullarkey

June 12, 2025

Leo XIV’s sermon on Pentecost Sunday took its keynote from Benedict XVI. On Pentecost, 2005, Benedict proclaimed: “The Spirit opens borders… She [the Church] must open the borders between peoples and break down the barriers between class and race. In her, there cannot be those who are neglected or disdained.” Benedict was not the first pope to oblige globalism by doing theology with one eye on geopolitics. Massive problems have followed that trajectory. Some are on view right now in the streets of Los Angeles. Continue Reading

The Samaritan Woman: Devotional Reading & Misreading

Maureen Mullarkey

April 22, 2025

“Is theology poetry?” C. S. Lewis asked the question in a 1944 talk to an Oxford debating society called the “Socratic Club.” Nearly two decades later it became the title of one essay published in a collection: They Asked For A Paper (1962).

Does Christian Theology owe its attraction to its power of arousing and satisfying our imaginations? are those who believe it mistaking aesthetic enjoyment for intellectual assent, or assenting because they enjoy? . . . . if Theology is Poetry, it is not very good poetry.