Author: D. A. Hosek
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Eternity
A week ago I saw a screening of the new movie, Eternity, which was a decent enough romantic comedy set in the afterlife.¹ I’m not going to write a review of the film itself, but instead there were two aspects of the afterlife as presented in the film that really captured my attention: First, the idea…
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Catholic Nerd Pilgrimage: Saint Columbanus (Saint Moses the Black)
Today is the feast of St Columbanus (albeit superseded by the feast of Christ the King). A number of options today, including an actual Christ the King parish, but I went with St Moses the Black (whose building was originally St Columbanus) because I really needed some Black church in my life. And while the…
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A visit with my younger self: 23 February 1989
I think at this point I may have been either on my way back to Chicago after dropping out of college or already there. I was largely writing down story ideas at this point. Plot line: a young man is dating a girl who cheats on him because he doesn’t have sex with her. The…
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“The boy who loved music”: The story behind the story
My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: The National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini
The shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was built in response to pilgrimages of people coming to visit the room at Columbus Hospital in Chicago where she worked for a time during her lifetime. The hospital was closed and demolished in 2002 to be replaced with high rise luxury housing, but the shrine was left…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: St Elizabeth of the Trinity (three days late)
Saturday, I went to Mass at St Elizabeth of the Trinity, the new name of St Tarcissus church after the parish was merged with St Cornelius and St Thecla. All the Masses of the weekend celebrated the saint and used the readings for her feast rather than the regular ordinary time readings for the Mass.…
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Father Chris
It’s kind of fashionable to write off Catholic priests as reactionaries and/or child molesters and/or hypocrites. And doubtless there are many priests who fit into one or more of those categories. Chris Ponnet, though was not one of them. I first met him on a Sunday morning in 1990 when I went to a Mass…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Queen of All Saints
For All Saints Day, I went to Queen of All Saints Basilica on the far north side of Chicago. Queen of All Saints is one of three minor basilicas in the Archdiocese of Chicago, a title which, as near as I can tell, means that the church is quite attractive and entitles the clergy to…
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Writerly resolutions: October status
This is a truly lousy month for writing progress. Even though I took a few days to take a mini-writing retreat at a hotel an hour away, I got very little writing done. My sole real accomplishment on the novel was doing some post-workshop revisions on chapter six (and workshopping chapter seven last night). My…