God draws straight with crooked lines.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.

Survey data suggest that war has become more unpopular. The majority of the American people now think it was a mistake, in a shift away from the 51 percent that endorsed it on Election Day. Admittedly this is only a small change in the population, from a majority to a minority. Nor do the changers earn grace for their new opinions. They still endorsed the war on Election Day and are still responsible for it.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn't the end.