When my youngest child leaves for college and I am sitting in my quiet house missing everybody and all the mess and the noise, I am going to look up on the wall of my kitchen, there above the coffee maker, where I wrote myself a note.
Last winter, I wrote an essay about returning to Notre Dame for the first time in decades to attend my 25th reunion. “The Reluctant Domer” put to words my ambivalence about returning to a place where I hadn’t always felt at ease.
Christmas Mass in our large and affluent parish has a buzz, an energy to it. And I hate it. Like the grinchiest grinch who ever grinched off to Mass, I hate it.
We hope for gifts and — more — the meaning behind them. We hope for the good times and comforts of family. We hope for peace and well-being. We hope for Jesus Christ to come to earth, to come into our lives.
The Great Nativity Question, in any conscientious Catholic household, is whether baby Jesus takes up his position in the stable with the rest of the figurines or stays in the box until 12:01 on Christmas morning.
“Mom, where do flies live?” “Flies live outside.” “I know that, but where do they go night-night?”
As the scale of the military intervention has increased in Afghanistan, so has the armed violence and influence of the Taliban. Reversing this deadly dynamic will require an approach that pursues demilitarization through the gradual disengagement of U.S. and NATO military forces.
My Notre Dame spectator experience has been teaching me a lot about being a fan. Recent lesson: You wanna be a hockey fan? Toughen up.
When I finished writing the Joseph Brennan obituary for our winter print edition, I knew I had more to say. It has gone unsaid for decades, and it’s too late now.
Hardly anybody dies on the field anymore. After 18 college football players were killed in the 1905 season, Teddy Roosevelt helped resuscitate a sport on a grim slog to the grave. He convened Ivy League leaders and the resulting rules changes saved lives.
Google employees can now have personal odd jobs done at company expense. If Pope Benedict XVI knows about the perk, doubtless he would give his blessing.
Strips 43-47 of the popular comic strip Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977.
I was so tired of baking cookies and frosting cupcakes and listening to my kids fight over nutcrackers that I opened the fridge, took out some bottle we opened for dinner who-knows-when and had a cold glass of not-that-great wine.
“That? That’s just a picture of Mary,” Sister Antoinette said. “That picture can’t help you, but she will, always.”
The verbal assault from the back seat is loud. “You’re mean. I don’t love you anymore. You are the worst mommy ever.” My daughter punctuates herself by throwing a doughnut at my head.
Sentry duty is what the Advent season is all about. Paying attention and keeping a weather eye, because as the days of Noah were before the flood, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.