Internet Child Exploitation

[FirstThings.com Blog, August 21, 2006] 

Buried in the course of Sunday’s New York Times front page story about pedophilia and the internet there was an unexpected kernel of good news. There are “a shrinking number of internet locations for sexual images of minors.” A pedophile who goes by the screen name Heartfallen complained to a discussion list that the sources for graphic child porn are disappearing: “They’ve vanished. There is much less freedom on the internet now.”

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A Bouquet of Vacuums for Mother's Day

[National Review Online, May 12, 2006] 

On Mother’s Day, what says “I love you, Mom!” like a new vacuum cleaner? A whole lot of dark chocolate with almonds might do it. Or a pair of chunky silver earrings, or a dozen of the smelliest roses. Even a phone call saying “I love you, Mom!” does a pretty good job. But it takes a vacuum cleaner to really evoke the whole motherhood experience. Oh, the many times I shoved a vacuum under a child’s bed and got a pajama bottom tangled around the brushroll. Do tears spring up prompted by wistful memory, or by the smoke of the jammed rubber belt?

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Loving the Storm-Drenched

[Christianity Today, March 2006]

Selected for Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007

If you hang around with Christians, you find that the same topic keeps coming up in conversation: their worries about “the culture.” Christians talk about sex and violence in popular entertainment. They talk about bias in news reporting. They talk about how their views are ignored or misrepresented. “The culture” appears to be an aggressive challenge to “the church,” and Christians keep worrying over what to do about it.

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Three Kinds of Childhood Innocence

[Unpublished; email to a friend, January 7, 2006]

There are three things people mean when they talk of childhood innocence: vulnerability, ignorance, and moral purity. (I touched on this in my First Things piece on “Against Eternal Youth,” but didn’t have room to get into it fully.)
 
A child's (1) vulnerability ought to stir us; we want to protect them physically and emotionally. That's one of our most urgent drives. But (3) moral purity is a chimera; children are born completely selfish, and slowly and painfully learn to make room for others in their lives.

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Against Eternal Youth

[First Things, August 2005]

I'm a fan of old movies, the black-and-whites from the 30's and 40's, in part because of the things this time-travel reveals about how American culture has changed. One thing that's struck me lately is how differently the adults in these films carry themselves, walk and speak. It seems adults used to have a whole different kind of bearing. It's hard sometimes to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be. They seem to be portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don't even *have* any more.

Take the 1934 version of "Imitation of Life." Here Claudette Colbert portrays a young widow who builds a successful business (selling pancakes, actually. Well, it's more believable if you see the whole movie.)

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All We Can Do Is Watch

[Beliefnet, January 7, 2005]

On December 26 the tsunami hit, and on the 27th I set out on a long car trip, circling through the south and visiting family. So while most of you were being continually hammered by new and terrible information, I was getting it in small, amazing pieces - a headline on a motel newspaper, a TV broadcast in a diner. The numbers mounted in a way that seemed unreal, artificial. At first it was twenty thousand feared dead, then seventy, and all of a sudden someone told me the toll was nearing 140,000.

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Won't Grow Up

[Dallas Morning News, December 22, 2004]

In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Leonardo DiCaprio, adorable star of "Titanic," "Catch Me If You Can," and now, "The Aviator." In the other, we have - oh, pick a name. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, even Jimmy Stewart, for cryin' out loud. Notice any difference?

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Is This Shark Gay?

[Beliefnet, December 13, 2004]

In this tense post-election climate there's a tendency to look for suspicious messages in everything but the stickers on grocery-store produce. That's the only way I can explain a writing assignment that included these instructions: "I need you to go to a movie and find out whether the shark is gay."

Now, sharks have done some memorable things in American movies, but this would be a first. Granted, they're usually engaged in disrupting social norms, but not in the size-twelve-high-heels way.

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Goin' to Take a Hyphenated Journey

[National Review Online, June 1, 2004]

As the hubby and I approach our 30th anniversary, our youngest is approaching his wedding day. Stephen's older brother David and sister Megan preceded him into wedded bliss, and have already built up our stock of grandchildren to the number of five; no doubt these newest newlyweds will supplement in time.

But none of our grandchildren will bear our name. Like David and Megan before him, Steve will take this opportunity to change his last name. So long, hyphen-Green.

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Abu Ghraib and Pitesti

[Dallas Morning News, May 26, 2004]

While most of the world is reeling at the ugliness perpetrated by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, I've had the feeling I've seen it all before. Rather, I've heard it, from a white-haired Romanian priest who suffered in the dread Pitesti prison outside Bucharest. Fr. George Calciu is now pastor of a small white-clapboard church in northern Virginia, and my spiritual father.

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