When my mother was still alive, one of the stories she used to tell was about the role of Catholics in the desegregation of my Mississippi Delta hometown during the 1960s. One white priest, a “Father Love,” she said, had come to town to be in residence at St. Francis, the “black Catholic church,” and…

  A few years ago, I spent nearly every spring morning with my young daughter in the tiny playground behind Notre Dame Cathedral. It was a great place to take a break. There were comfy benches and shade trees and clean bathrooms with an attendant.   Often, we’d find ourselves back in the center of town…

Poet Molly McCully Brown’s prizewinning first collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is about a real, state-run residential hospital for people with serious mental and physical disabilities that was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. If she’d been born in another time, Molly Brown might have been a patient at the Virginia Colony.

This is a love story. If there is such a thing as the Gospel of Fleabag, then this is how it begins. In the beginning, there was Fleabag herself, patron saint of jumpsuits, standing at the bathroom sink, face smeared inexplicably with blood. She glances at the camera—at you—and smiles. “This is a love story,”…

…Christ was never more than a man nailed to across but from him I learned that an entire lifefits into a person’s palm like a book of poemslike an executioner’s hammer now at thirty fiveI have learned confession won’t save me… Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Exiled from the Throne…

What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure… So begins one of my favorite of Rafael Campo’s poems, “What I Would Give,” from his 2002 collection Landscape with Human Figure. Right from the start, the poem enacts Campo’s…

Living in brownstone South Brooklyn, we walk everywhere. There is always something to look at. This is an Italian Catholic neighborhood; a casual atmosphere of bathtub Marys and various saints lounge in the front yards. Some are well-attended, brightly white, watching over manicured lawns. Others crumble in silence, their owners old mainstays in a swiftly…

“My church and my country could use a little mercy now,As they sink into a poisoned pit it’s going to take forever to climb out.They carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down.I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now.”                  …

I haven’t any major gripes with the Roman Catholic Church. On the whole, I feel gratitude. The church took me in when I needed some in-taking. Living in Detroit, however, I have found myself worshipping at Saint Anthony over on the East Side. The Mass at Saint Anthony is presided over by Bishop Karl Rodig,…