They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Isaiah 2:4 Gian Sardar wrote a book about her father who grew up in Kurdistan. “I saw my father as a boy in fields of blood-red poppies,” she said in an interview. “I imagined the mud huts he lived in, the sound of the call to prayer early in the morning and...

Fulton J. Sheen once said that Marian devotion is so central to Catholic practice and history that one could say that being Catholic is to be devoted to Mary. Yet, we know this isn’t so. Tainted, perhaps by our Protestant friend’s views of Mary, we can share a suspicion that to go to Mary is to not go to Jesus, to choose her over Him. For eve...

There’s a classic pickup line that, I presume, was actually used by someone, somewhere. Although, I’ve only heard it in comical, cynical, or cliché scenes in movies. That line is, “What is a nice woman like you doing in a place like this?” The question is loaded. (Imagining the scene in a bar makes me think other things might be loaded....