A Different Perspective

A Psychology and Theology of Clergy Abuse

In her essay on “Place in Fiction” Southern writer Eudora Welty writes about places and regions that confine and define. This seems to me to be a profound psychological statement. Perhaps there is no region of the country where authors have so captured the…

Listening to the Lady from Sicily

I heard the young guys off in the corner telling harmless Jesus jokes, apparently borrowed from some faintly civilized meme contest on Facebook. The grandson in the midst was ordering everyone into a Conga line, destined to wait patiently for a stick-on Ninja Turtle…

The Punishing Psychology of Wanting

The Jungian psychologist begins the class on Ambition, Limitation, and the Desire for a Significant Life by doing his best, understated imitation of the Spice Girls and their much parodied and maligned chorus of “I want, I want, I want.” The teacher offers this soft…

The Affair

Her name is Isabel. I’ve known about her my entire life; she is the neighbor who slept with my father when I was a baby. Isabel was also married, they were good friends of my parents. There still are so many photos of the whole crowd, at picnics by the river, at cocktail parties, neighborhood gatherings.

Pope John Paul II, Love Letters and the Voice of the Feminine

It’s just another day at the office. The morning has been a bit of a slog, with me knocking around the Council of Nicaea in 787 AD, listening to the 350 bishops who were sitting in a divine circle, mumbling about the trinity…

The Vatican Bank, Libido, and a Theology of the Feminine

It’s about 2:00 a.m. and I hear the haunting sounds of a barred owl “woo, woo, woo” outside my bedroom window. I know the oak tree where she lives. I feel some kind of kinship with the owl and in my sleepy state start singing in…