Brian Caulfield

  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... Read More →

  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... Read More →

  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... Read More →

  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... Read More →

  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... Read More →

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... Read More →

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,... Read More →

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... Read More →

Well, that’s done for another year. You know what I mean: Halloween. Call me a sour puss whose kids are beyond the trick-or-treat phase, but Halloween seems to get more eerie every year, and not in fun or healthy ways. The ghosts and goblins come out earlier, with some stores now... Read More →

You may recognize the fractured English in my title as the considered judgment of Mr. Bumble, the selfish, scheming, self-satisfied character in Oliver Twist. In true Dickensian style, he lives up to his name as his petty plots while working as parish beadle backfire, leaving him... Read More →