Jonathan Ryan's Blog, page 48

Bear One Another’s Burdens This Election Day.

I looked around at my fellow Confirmands, most of them hiding zits with heavy doses of foundation cream. Others wore too much makeup, perfume or cologne. The boys checked out the girls in their bright colored dresses and the girls looked at the boys who probably wore the first suit they had ever worn in [Read More...]

Pornography, the Election, and the Problem of a Woman in Power

I firstexperienced pornography when I was 10 years old. It was 1985. One of my younger uncleshad come to live with us for a while, and he stashed his collection of porn magazines in a box in the attic. My brother and I came across them while looking for the Easter decorations, buried beneath the [Read More...]

The Dead Don’t Marry

“The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the [Read More...]

Hillary and Trump Are Not Us: Baseball is.

So, full disclosure. I’m a Cardinal fan. A serious, committed, Cardinal fan. Since the age of five, I listened to Jack Buck call the games while in my bed, sweating from the heat of my stifling old farmhouse in Southern Indiana. And, I’m a baseball fan. My childhood memories are full of my grandfather’s baseball [Read More...]

Making Contact: From the Ouija Board to the Catholic Church

In Octoberwe called for spooky stories from all our friends who follow the blog, and my friend Joanna told me some unnerving tales of her experiences with a Ouija board: I am a freshman in college home for fall or winter break. The board is still at my house, and I’ve decided to play [Read More...]

Slavery Still Haunts Us

On November 2, the Catholic Church celebrates All Souls’ Day, to remember and pray for all who have died; not just the saints we assume are already in Heaven (all saints). The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the [Read More...]

The Crucifixion Made Halloween Possible

The recent death of Jack Chick made me think about my own personal history with Halloween. For awhile, we celebrated the holiday like any normal Catholic family. The last year I remember dressing up, I wore a Yoda costume because of my deep abiding love for Star Wars. But, as my parents got deeper into [Read More...]

Dark Devotional: The Terror of the Saintly Call

At that time, Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So [Read More...]

We are Blood Thirsty: Twilight, Fifty Shades, and Leviticus

Editor’s Note:This post discusses ritualistic cutting and self-injury in the context of a theology of blood. If you or someone you love practices non-suicidal self-injury to relieve emotional pain, more information and resources are available here. More than half of girls aged 10-14 and one in five aged 10-18 ritualistically bleed themselves through cutting [Read More...]

Things Keeping the Undead Alive

We’ve been relishing October here at the blog, though not for all the pumpkin-spiced crap. We enjoy the unabashed focus on the eerie, the ghostly, the supernatural; for many of us at Sick Pilgrim, they served as our gateway to Christianity and the Church. So this time of year is, in many ways, our homecoming. [Read More...]