(Dreamstime/Juan Moyano)
For the last nine months, Greenwich Village s famous sing-along piano bar Marie s Crisis has been streaming five hours of live performance every night. Performers sing Broadway standards from their homes and rooftops while viewers send requests and hopefully tips.
I have been tuning in for a while now. There is nothing like a guy singing Oklahoma in his backyard while his nephew does cartwheels behind him to get your mind off the endless hellish weekend that has been 2020.
But I ve found watching has offered me another kind of relief as well. For almost 30 years I ve worked in the Catholic Church as a Jesuit seminarian and priest. It has been a tremendously rewarding life, filled with challenges to grow and inspiring people.
This is the wake of
your leaving.
in mid-flight,
of ash.
waving my surrender in the
sticky summer wind.
Underneath my feet, trampled,
are the delicate leaves of a wild rose.
Still, they search for sun.
In this week’s Earth Matters, Nyack native Evie Toland talks about her poem,
Before the Phoenix Returns. Toland was inspired to write the poem after her house nearly burned down in a wildfire this summer. Read the poem below.
Who are you?
My name is Evie Toland and I currently live in Southwest Colorado. I was born in New York City, but moved to Nyack when I was 8 and spent the rest of my childhood attending the public schools there, spending Sundays at the street fair, and arguing that Nyack kids were way cooler than Valley Cottagians.
Stop Saying You re Happily Married
If we were more honest about the challenges of so-called wedded bliss, we d all be better off. Getty
In bed one night, my husband told me, “I talked to Dave today. He and Chloe are getting divorced.”
The last time we saw Dave and Chloe, they were the picture of a happy couple. We’d shared a pizza and beer, talked about the vacation they’d just taken and how they wanted to have kids but weren’t sure when. Maybe my husband and I were also the picture of a happy couple, holding our three-month-old baby, joking about how tired we were. Two couples in our thirties, with our easy smiles and glasses of wine, arms slung causally around each other, happily married.
Top 10 Famous People that Nobody Can Identify
When one changes the world, they can at least expect to be remembered. History is littered with people who stumbled into achievements. Only a select elite get their name jotted down in the textbooks. For a distinct few, their achievement gets recorded, while their name fades into obscurity. Everyone knows the following 10 iconic cultural and historical moments, but nobody knows who is responsible for them.
10 The Youngest Olympian It must stink when a total stranger can do your job better than you can, especially when you are supposed be the best in the world. As standard bearers for the peak of human physique, it was surely a blow when Dr. Hermanus Brockmann was deemed too fat to participate in the Olympics. Along with rowers Francois Brandt and Roelof Klein, Brockmann was the Dutch rowing team’s coxswain. His team members decided that Brockmann’s excessive weight would slow down the crew. To shave precious seconds off their time
By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 08, 2021
Happy New Year! It’s time for the annual article in which members of the Catholic Culture staff look back on their reading in the past year and recommend the best, some published in 2020 and some not. Actually, this list is not confined to reading only. You’ll get book recommendations from Jeff Mirus, Phil Lawler and Mike Aquilina; book and film recommendations from James T. Majewski; and book, essay, podcast, music and (way too many) film recommendations from Thomas V. Mirus. Enjoy!
Jeff Mirus
The best books I read in 2020 were all new titles among the books I reviewed on CatholicCulture.org during the course of the year with the exception of the last one, for which this survey will constitute my review. Apparently 2020 was a year in which I was most impressed by authors who increased my spiritual understanding and fueled my spiritual growth, though each in a different way and on a di