Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Kate Massinger
Humanae Vitae, a Half-Century On
In Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, German Jesuit Klaus Schatz had this to say about encyclicals: “Papal teachings of this kind before Humanae Vitae (1968) hardly ever encountered any significant opposition within the Church.” With 2017 and the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation having passed, 2018 is shaping up as the anniversary of a different kind of reformation—or a different kind of schism.
On Fire, Fury...& Decency?
Predictably, Trump responded to Fire and Fury with fire and fury of his own, claiming that he never met Wolff and that Bannon had “lost his mind” when he was fired. Trump also had his lawyers try to stop publication of the book.
Justice for Puerto Rico
A good new year’s resolution for the United States government in 2018 would be to do justice to the commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its three million American citizens as they suffer with the aftermath of two powerful hurricanes. It’s been said that if one part of the body suffers, all parts of it suffer. But the other parts may shake off the pain, or not even recognize it until too late. That’s when a powerful antidote is needed.
Love & the Law | Commonweal Magazine
While he would later lament that, “in the twentieth century, international law . . . has so far distanced itself from religion that the latter receives scarcely a mention in the standard texts,” Weeramantry the brilliant lawyer never left religion behind. At Monash he wrote a book on Islamic jurisprudence—partly to counter the lack of knowledge and appreciation for this tradition that he found among his students, but also to stress Islamic contributions to international law.
Desire in Body & Spirit
Jamie Quatro’s first short story collection, I Want to Show You More (2013), was remarkably good. Her first novel, Fire Sermon, is even better. Both books explore those dramatic experiences—the beginnings and ends of affairs; visionary moments when the world seems on “the cusp of cataclysm,” revelation, or both—when the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the carnal, touch one another.
‘The Last Jedi’: A Fan’s Notes
On December 19—opening night—I saw The Last Jedi, Episode VIII of the Star Wars saga. As both a cultural and commercial phenomenon the film has proved, well, pretty epic. By New Year’s Day, less than two weeks into its run, it had hit over a billion dollars at the box office worldwide, already quintupling its $200 million budget.
Sacred Stories, Modern Audiences
In a gilded back chapel of New York’s Riverside Church, a small ensemble performs the modern premiere of Giuditta, a 1705 oratorio by Baroque composer Domenico Freschi. Five singers play parts in the story of Judith, the woman warrior who seduced and beheaded her peoples’ enemy. Strings, a recorder, and a continuo group cluster onstage, bowing and blowing and tapping in the glow of golden lamps. A countertenor, playing the villainous Olofernes, steals the show with piercing threats.
A Problem Only Politics Can Solve
Piketty claims that the major exceptions to the historical norm of r > g were the result of cataclysmic events like the Second World War, when wartime taxation and widespread destruction of factories and machines reduced capital’s income share across the industrialized world.
Madness to Their Method
Before he became famous (or infamous) for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg spent more than a decade working in relative anonymity as a national-security analyst in the employ of the RAND Corporation. Here he provides an account of what he was doing before photocopying a horde of classified documents related to the Vietnam War for further distribution to the New York Times and Washington Post.
Swiping Back at Big Phone
The substitution of virtual friendship for physically-present friendship hasn’t been salutary. Twenge cites surveys that have posed a set of life-quality questions to high school seniors annually for the last forty years.
Sacred Things | Commonweal Magazine
In his heartfelt October 19 lament to the White House press corps, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly got many things wrong, but he was not wrong about how little contact most Americans have with those serving in the military.
No Sunset Conversion
The early moments of director John Carroll Lynch’s drama Lucky establish that its title character is a creature of routine: Harry Dean Stanton wakes, lights a cigarette, finds some norteno music on the radio, does his yoga stretches in the dusty living room of his desert bungalow, and walks to the diner in town to work on the crossword puzzle.
Snakes, Violence & Grace?
Needless to say, there is a lot going on, narratively and allegorically, in this painting, and in the handful of smaller Villalpando works on view in a nearby gallery. The Adoration of the Magi, also done in 1683, uses a similar palette, and the characters depicted share many of the same features as those in the altarpiece. Everyone seems to have heavy and arched eyebrows. Ears, noses, and lips are also fairly uniform. Villalpando is not known for being much of a draftsman.
Faithful Translation
These are significant elements in the translation philosophy of Comme le prévoit. And now they are no longer the words of an obsolete instruction, much less a document standing in the shadows of official disapproval. They have become Pope Francis’s own words, spoken for our time. It is also important to note that there are no comparable borrowings from Liturgiam authenticam in Francis’s motu proprio.
Poems Against Paralysis
When we get to the volta, the turn between the opening octave and the closing sestet, O’Donnell enjambs lines 8 and 9, running the sentence across the white space of the stanza break: What’s done is done and cannot be undone except for this. Slow light in its slow rowing across the sea of space from star to star glides back home, the evening sky glowing longer each night. There’s an absolute break between these two stanzas.
Can the Churches Be Reunited?
I want to turn for a moment to the Reformational doctrine of justification by faith, the idea that our salvation is solely the result of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and cannot be attributed in any way to our own efforts or “works.” It was this doctrine, of course, that sparked the Reformation, and it was this doctrine that the Reformation found at the heart of the Gospel and the apostolic tradition.
Poem | Old Miami
Levine used to say if you remember one of his readings that Donald Justice had never seen a worker, and Justice who had practiced his childhood piano on one of Miami’s old streets could recall a sunburned man with a bucket of masonry trowels who had walked by the porch window of his piano teacher one summer at the end of a lesson hour, his red hair stiffened by mortar.
They Only Look like Zombies
I called up some buddies and asked if they ever experienced this kind of thing. To my surprise, many had. Most chalked it up to “last chance” Mass syndrome—gotta go somewhere, anywhere, stop the car, let’s duck in here—and simply accepted it for what is was, not letting it trouble them a bit.
From Scotland to Sicily
The Reformation runs through me like a river, five hundred years after its Wittenberg spring. I am a Protestant. Yet Luther’s floodplain has left me with what may surprise you, the sediment of a catholic sensibility. What do I mean? Do you know the scene in the movie Good Night and Good Luck when legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow’s colleague in the television newsroom is making elaborate plans for Christmas? But Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, someone objects.
When Was It Better?
“The democratic social state,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “comprises those like oneself.” The history of democratic society has been shaped by the questions embedded in this deceptively simple remark: How much alike must we be in order for democracy to work? How much can or should be done to abolish the things that divide us, such as differences in education, status, or wealth?
Open to Opposition
The heat that a group of conservative academics generated by publicly accusing Pope Francis of heresy this summerin a letter they released September 23 is warming up the Catholic environment for dissent. And in the end, the pope’s patience with critics like these could do a lot to reform the culture of the church. It is one more way Francis is sculpting the church that the Second Vatican Council envisioned.
Taunting a Tyrant
During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s penchant for mean nicknames and juvenile insults was a source of fascination and morbid amusement. Since the election, it’s become an object of growing concern, even for members of his own staff.
Marching for Cristoforo
I’ll be marching in New York’s Columbus Day Parade this year in honor of Cristoforo. Cristoforo Colombo, yes, but also my grandfather Cristoforo Moscato, who migrated to New York in 1902 from Cerasi, a picturesque but very poor village in the Aspromonte mountains of Calabria. I don’t know if he thought of the other Cristoforo as he made his own way across the ocean blue, a stowaway according to family lore. I never met him; he died the year before I was born.
‘Love is Not a Magic Force’
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is as strong, and strange, a short story collection as any you’ll read this year. From story to story, often from paragraph to paragraph, Machado mixes and matches genres—a fairy tale here and a post-apocalyptic vision there, a little science fiction sprinkled with a little body horror—reconfiguring old tropes and helping us to see what is at stake in them.
America’s Worst Mass Shooting, Until the Next One
This morning I brought my sixth-grade daughter’s trumpet to her school—she had forgotten it—where I saw that the flag was already flying at half-mast in honor of the victims of last night’s mass murder in Las Vegas. I live in Connecticut, just half an hour from Sandy Hook, where five years ago Adam Lanza burst into a first-grade classroom and slaughtered twenty children. My daughter was in first grade then, the same age as those kids, which made the horror of that day extra-real to me.
No More Composure
Watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick Vietnam documentary, we listen in (via White House tapes) on LBJ and later Nixon as they agonize about the war with advisers and confidants. In the process we hear the full range of sentiments expressed by presidents speaking confidentially—often angry, full of bluster and invective, and certainly not above calling this or that antagonist “a son of a bitch,” or worse.
Francis’s Plan for the Theology of the Body
This did not allay fears expressed in conservative Catholic media that John Paul’s teachings were being put aside. Outlets that once prized obedience to the papacy continue to present Pope Francis and his appointees through a veil of suspicion.
But Consider the Alternative
In reminding its readers that the AfD “got nearly three times the 4.7 percent it received in 2013,” Monday’s New York Times makes the election results seem a bit more impressive than they really are. It overlooks the dramatic rise of the party in the wake of Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 welcome of Syrian and other refugees. At least from the perspective of eighteen months ago, a much better benchmark, I would argue that the AfD is a marginally reduced threat.
Keep Them Poor & Tired
From the beginning we know the end; The Road to Jonestown shows its cards immediately. In the book’s prologue, officials discover more than nine hundred of Jim Jones’s followers dead in the Guyanese jungle. They are decomposed in piles, faces melting in the tropical heat. Some of the bodies have bruises, marks of resistance. The tragedy is deemed a murder-suicide. Some took their poison willingly; others, children included, had it squirted into their mouths. The year is 1978.
Letters | Mystery, parish visitors, etc.
The survey of Masses in your parish issue (“An Ordinary Sunday,” September 22) certainly struck many chords with me, as I am a person who typically worships with different Catholic communities during the course of a year. The varied reports all raise different and interesting questions. Why are some celebrations truly special and others “routine”? Recently I heard two homilies, one on Mary and the other on John the Baptist.
Between Two Empires
It wasn’t exactly summer reading, but it was remaindered, only $5.98! Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian would finally clarify the role of its author in the Middle East and U.S. policy. I snapped it up. The author, Bernard Lewis (now 101 years old) has seen and said a lot. A renowned scholar and historian, he is an expert on Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey.
How Oregon towns are preparing for the eclipse.
If you’re driving to John Day, Oregon, from any direction, be warned. For the last 90 miles of your journey, you won’t find a single gas station. No fast food. No cell service. Just sunset-colored canyons and fossil beds. And on Monday, when a total solar eclipse creates moments of midmorning darkness, you won’t even see the canyons. Eastern Oregon can handle a couple of campers—but what about 1 million tourists?
Nose to the Glass
In this room of the museum, every visitor is bent at the knees. Many of us are squinting. The Met Cloisters is a place of grand gestures—magnificent tapestries, airy stone hallways, carpets of flowers, a view from a hill. But at this particular exhibit, we observers are taking time to see the small. The woman next to me accidentally bumps her nose against the glass case she is crouching to inspect. She giggles from embarrassment, but her eager curiosity isn’t out of place.
Letter from Rome
The pope sees this as part of his global mission beyond the boundaries of the Roman Church. And despite his eighty years of age he has embraced it with surprising energy, a sense of urgency and, yet, with a calm and trusting demeanor. The papal visit to Cairo was billed as a success on many fronts. Still, it will take time before we see if Francis’s quest for a joint Christian-Muslim project against religious fanaticism takes root and grows.
How the Light Gets In
Cohen was not entirely pessimistic about the future of politics. In “Democracy,” he pleads hopefully that the “mighty ship of state” might “sail on...to the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate.” For democracy to recover its potential, two things needed to happen. First, denizens of democratic states needed to recover their confidence that pluralism and unity could co-exist.
The Faith Community & Climate Change
JG: In Laudato si,’ Pope Francis stresses that climate change is a moral issue and urgent action is required. What impact do you think the Pope has had on political and policy conversations when it comes to the environment? DM: Despite the recent political setbacks, I remain encouraged that policy conversations have become more serious and more sustained.
Remembering John T. Noonan
Writing in Commonweal in 2009, Cathleen Kaveny said Noonan’s “contributions to both the bench and the academy are prodigious” and wrote of his work that it “provides the concrete evidence that demonstrates the truth of Alasdair MacIntyre’s tradition theory with respect to theology and to law.
Catholic Traditionalism, Old & New
If there’s a Catholic analog for Nixon going to China, maybe it’s Pope Francis going to Ecône, the headquarters of the Society of St. Pius X. The entire pontificate of Francis, who has been called “the unlikeliest of bridge-builders,” has been marked by increasingly welcoming gestures to the traditionalist group founded by French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970, and which was in formal schism from the Church from 1976 to 1988.
Letter from Rome
Pope Francis has spent his four years as Bishop of Rome steadily and tenaciously waging a campaign to change the mentality of individual Catholics and the ethos of the entire church, which he dreams of being an outward-looking, accident-prone and getting-its-hands-dirty community that is “on the move”. In fact, the pope’s “attitude adjustment program” is gradually reshaping the very identity of global Catholicism, even though it’s not to everyone’s liking.
Prayer Cards & Holy Dirt
With the publication of The Madonna of 115th Street, his now thirty-year-old study of piety in Italian Harlem, Orsi established himself as an insightful interpreter of U.S. Catholic life and developed a reputation as a trendsetter in religious history. As he exposed the intricate links between sacred and secular in the lives of immigrants and their progeny, he demonstrated a refined capacity to see what others had missed.
How Women Are Harassed Out of Science
Graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, after they filed complaints of sexual harassment against a professor Jeff Chiu / AP When Joan was an undergraduate, in the 1970s, she asked her boyfriend why one of his roommates was finishing up a Ph.D. while another, in the same department, still had several years left. “Barbara’s rigid,” her boyfriend said. His other roommate, Karen, had slept with her advisor, but Barbara refused to sleep with hers.
Misericordia in the Internet Age
I discovered Orlando via Facebook. A friend from school—gay, Latino, Floridian—had posted a paragraph, raw and eloquent. Social media had donned its mourning clothes, my newsfeed strewn with posts and photos. It was the same Internet grief that followed Paris, Charleston, and San Bernardino, that is even now succeeding St. Paul, Baton Rouge, and Dallas.
'Battling the Gods'
Buried in the pages of this short, disappointing book is a shorter, better book; and, had Tim Whitmarsh confined himself to writing simply as a classicist and historian, the latter is what he might have produced. Unfortunately, he chose to pursue a grander purpose, and that one occasioned by those voguish volumes of popular atheism that have been burdening bookshelves with their unbearable lightness for a decade now.
The Case Against Intervention
On September 10, President Barack Obama delivered a widely anticipated speech addressing the alarming growth in the scope and power of the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The president announced that in order to defeat ISIS, the United States would ramp up military intervention in the Middle East, arming insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq and using airstrikes to support allies in the region. The speech was important.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Kate
Contact Kate, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack