I cover the upcoming Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, and its mission to revive appreciation for religious liberty. "Local Projects, a design studio that worked on the September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, is designing exhibits for the center. Founder Jake Barton says the goal of many interactions will be to help visitors see “how their values connect them to other Americans present and past.” Working on the project, he says, gave him a new perspective on

I wrote this piece last year for New Year's Eve/The Feast of Mary, Mother of God. It wasn't published, so I'm putting it up this year on my site. January 1st is the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, a feast celebrated by Catholics and some other Christians. It falls on the eighth day of the Christmas season, and commemorates Christ’s mother, Mary, under one of her most glorious titles: The Mother of God, or Theotokos. But of course, this feast coincides with New Year’s Day. T

"There’s a kernel of an interesting religious film in First Reformed, the new arthouse release from writer-director Paul Schrader (Mishima, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ). Unfortunately, it’s buried underneath the grim weight of the terrorist fantasy that Schrader really wants to explore. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a tortured Protestant reverend slowly killing himself with alcohol and self-neglect. His manly grimacing may net him an Oscar; it’s the sort of int

"The best plaque at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination has little to do with the fashionable ensemble it accompanies. It instead takes the fact that designer Rossella Jardini is riffing on the starched cornette of the Daughters of Charity (think The Flying Nun and you’re on the right track) to launch into an anecdote about Charles de Gaulle. Apparently, the statesmen felt such affection for the Grey Sisters’ traditio

I made another appearance on the podcast God and Comics, this accompanied by my wife Leah Libresco Sargeant, chatting with a geeky priest and deacon about the latest and greatest superhero epic, Avengers: Infinity War. One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was our discussion of the real world resonance of the film's antagonist Thanos, who reflects the despairing anti-natalist bent of many real people. Here's a transcribed excerpt: ME: I really appreciate what

I profiled the sculptor Dony Mac Manus, and he told me about how he sees his figural art as a way to help heal a pornified culture. He also discussed a time a giraffe lifted him up by its tongue and dislocated his shoulder. "Though he’ll happily point to the ways his work grows out of Catholic teaching and practice (a sculpture inspired by the papal encyclical Humanae vitae is a favorite of his), Mac Manus sees himself not as a “Catholic artist” but as an artist who is Cathol

"The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then transitions to asking (sincerely!) how a bad person can become good. You know the show is something special when the Kierkegaard jokes start and don’t let up. Bell plays a selfish woman

"We will not make our culture healthier or our children safer by treating the sexual assault of prisoners as normal, or funny, or just. And, more broadly, we can’t be satisfied granting human dignity to some people while casually dehumanizing others. Prisoners, even those who have done terrible things, are not “monsters” we can use (rhetorically or literally) like subhuman beasts. Wishing rape-as-punishment (even on rapists) is itself wicked and contributes to our broken pris

"The script, based on Lewis’s book A Grief Observed, tells how Joy Davidman, a brash American convert, barrelled into C.S. Lewis’s settled life as a dusty bachelor Oxford Don. Lewis and Joy married (technically), fell in love, married again (“in the eyes of God”), and then spent a few short years together before Joy died of bone cancer—leaving Lewis and her son Douglas to grapple with grief. Their first, civil marriage was for immigration reasons, a courtesy of Lewis to his f

"Despite their commitment to the idea that genuine community can exist on the internet, many rationalists have affirmed the importance of community in the flesh as well. Bay Area rationalists have even congregated in group houses. Another physical gathering place is the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), which advances the cause of combating existential AI risk by running intensive four-day workshops on rationality. The 2016 annual LessWrong survey of rationalists had abo