“Incel” Insults?

  Even if you’re not a Jordan Peterson fan, you’re probably aware that he recently set the term “incel” trending when he shed a tear for young men who identify as “involuntary celibates.” In a discussion with podcast host Piers Morgan, Peterson was asked to respond to...
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THE DEEP PLACES: A MEMOIR OF ILLNESS AND DISCOVERY

Ross Douthat (Convergent Books, 2021, hardcover, 224 pages, $26; Kindle $14.95) Reviewed by Brian Caulfield _________________________________________________________________ Halfway through this book, I called a friend who has had Lyme disease for more than four years. “Do you,”...
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“No Greater Love”

  Aware that it has been 25 years since Mother Teresa passed away, the creators of a new documentary are seeking to make her life and labors known to a generation for whom she may be an unfamiliar saint on the calendar (September 5). Mother Teresa: No Greater Love, produced...
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Senior Size Me

  It came in the mail. An “Official Business” government envelope would normally press my panic button, but I knew this had more to do with death than taxes. Actuaries not auditors were on my case. Inside the envelope was my Medicare card, carrying a unique number I am not...
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Life in the Face of Death

  The sun is shining brightly on a warming February afternoon along McLean Avenue, where every day looks like Saint Patrick’s Day. Past the Irish pubs, breakfast nooks, package stores, and Fáilte travel agencies of the Yonkers neighborhood moves a tall, exceedingly thin...
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Chesterton for What Ails Us

  We live in interesting, even dangerous, times. Take your pick of crises from the headlines: shootings; inflation; suicide epidemic; pandemic; opioid overdoses; looming war in the West; threats of violence if Roe v. Wade is overturned. There’s little good news or comfort...
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THINGS WORTH DYING FOR: THOUGHTS ON A LIFE WORTH LIVING

  Charles J. Chaput, OFM, Cap. (Henry Holt, 2021, 272 pages, hardcover, $25.99) Reviewed by Brian Caulfield __________________________________________ When he began writing, Archbishop Charles Chaput could not know that Things Worth Dying For would be released in a time of...
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Easter Enigmas

You would think after so long a time we’d be better at this. Lent, Holy Week, Easter. They’ve been observed for some two millennia—and for however many years in our own lives—yet by now, two days after Easter Sunday, we may wonder what it was all about. Well, let me speak for...
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When I’m Sixty-Four

Facebook found me out. At least I think it must have been the Zuckerberg conglomerate that culled and sold my personal data so that months before I turned the age the Beatles sang about, I began seeing targeted web ads for retirement investments—401k, IRA and estate strategies,...
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Boomers’ Last Gasp

If someone had told me of a plan to make a three-part TV documentary based on rare footage of the Beatles’ final recording session, I would probably have said, “Why bother?” Although the preposterously premised film Yesterday—which imagined that a cosmic glitch had wiped the...
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