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(This article first appeared in the August 23 issue of The Catholic Times, newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse) The modern Catholic fiction writer has a tough row to hoe. On the one hand, he is expected by his fellow Catholics, at least those unfamiliar with the complexities of modern literature, to write simple moral stories where good wins out over evil, the princess is saved and happily ever after becomes the only acceptable conclusion to a story. On the other hand, the Catholic fiction writer is also hoping to reach out to the modern non-Catholic and mostly non-Christian reader with the assumption that his story is worth hearing – and yet he must not say too much about the “R word” (religion) lest his readership begin heading in a panic for the exits. The 20th century southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor puts the dilemma this way in her 1957 essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer:” “Part of the complexity of the problem for the Catholic fiction writer will be the presence...

There seems to be something twitching in the cultural scalp that’s got so many folks itching about the fate of boyhood. There’s this little gem from the fellow over at Wondermark which is just a hoot. But it got me thinking about Hanna Rosin’s recent report in the Atlantic (WARNING: Much stripping of mystery and manners to the crude and obscene throughout): One of the women had already seen the [porn] photo five times before her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night that they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend asked if the two of them were getting married, he gave the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see it, so she wouldn’t get any ideas about a forthcoming ring. She remained unfazed. She was used to his “juvenile thing,” she told me. Which in turn reminded me of Jeff Minick’s piece in Chronicles (WARNING: much discussio...

…here’s a little video my brother made of our hometown in winter… Winter Lights from Mark Thomas Lickona on Vimeo .

Looks like we weren’t the only ones having a conference in the upper Midwest.

I know I said I wouldn’t post any more about it, but Betty Duffy has a fan-dabby-dooby write-up here .

Thought I was done posting about Ye Olde Conference for a while, but the California Lawyer passed this along.   Piggies!

I’ve got a bunch of these.  If you want one, lemme know.

Looks like the Korrektiv has something of a literary forebear: The term poete maudit , or “cursed poet,” was coined by Paul Verlaine.  His little book Les poetes maudits (1884) interleaved his own honorific prose with poems by some of the poets he most esteemed but whose very greatness assured that they were known only to the cognoscenti.  It was their obscurity – society was indifferent to them because they were hard to understand – that prompted Verlaine to speak of them as cursed. This cultivated sense of neglect, even oppression, at the hands of the bourgeois philistines became the classic pose of the avant-garde. But the curse seemed to be as much moral and spiritual as social, contributing to the presumption that a true artist must suffer agonies of genius…The paradigmatic poete maudit was Baudelaire (1821-67).  His Les fleurs du mal (1857), or The Flowers of Evil , is the most famous book of nineteenth-century  French poetry and one of the most f...

The houses of meeting: