Here’s exactly one hour’s worth — I have found two things to be certain when it comes to this site: 1) stories do indeed live forever, and 2) I cannot resist a music prompt even when it’s not a prompt. These two facts crashed into each other over the past few days when I discovered a…

We have to stop believing these — There is no complete count of the number of books written about the American Civil War, though a rough estimate puts the total at close to one hundred thousand; the number of articles online surely numbers in the millions. …

Part Eight of the ‘Not Many Mighty’ series — When I started this series, I said that my premise was that while we tend to overlook the flaws of prominent figures from the Bible, memorializing heroes like Moses, Elijah, and Peter in marble and stained-glass, they were just as screwed up as any of us…and God still used them…

The list is pathetically short — Believe it or not, I do listen to music that’s not Springsteen or The Smiths. What I don’t listen to nearly enough is what Americans call “world music,” which is anything not from the English-speaking world. …

The Big Three of Religious Orders, Part One — As promised when I introduced this short series on the Big Three of Catholic religious orders a few days ago, the first we’ll look at is the Dominicans. That’s not their official name, however; their official name is actually the Order of Preachers, which is why the initials “O.P.” follow…

I think we’re all rant-blocked — There was a time not so long ago when I could bang out a rant every Sunday morning like clockwork. In fact, I usually had so many rants running around my brain at any given moment that confining them to just Sunday was virtually impossible. …

Since August is the song’s 47th anniversary — As you’ve probably guessed, I am addicted to the Rate-A-Record prompt. I’m so addicted that I now have enough stories to create a decent list just for them (you can find it at the end of this article). …

A short series — Pretty much everyone on the planet can identify a priest or a nun simply by the particular clothing they wear. If you’re watching a film, whether it’s Bing Crosby in Going My Way, Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, or Ewan McGregor in Angels & Demons, the minute a priest…

My whole childhood was a lie — I have mentioned before that I’m a proud member of Generation X. It’s a stance that is part default response to our well-known fatalism (I can’t change the generation I was born into, so I might as well embrace it) and part acknowledgement that, with apologies to Tom Brokaw and…