I found this recent video produced by Disney interesting, even encouraging. It invites us – and particularly our daughters – to redefine what we mean by the term “princess.” Rather than have our daughters – and, for that matter, our sons as well! – see the ideal girl as a damsel in distress waiting for someone to rescue her, Disney invites them to imagine princesses as real girls, as strong girls, as, quite frankly, real strong girls. There’s an irony here, of course, as few corporations or story-tellers have done more to promote – or profit by – the traditional image of the princess than Disney. Yet in recent movies like...

Have you ever heard of “disability art”? Neither had I. Sue Austin is an artist, a performance artist, to be precise. And she is disabled, confined to a wheel chair. Except that she won’t allow it be confining. Actually, that’s not quite right. It’s not so much that the goal of her art is to transcend her wheelchair, but to repurpose it. To actually make use of it to see – and help us to see – the world differently. It’s a striking idea. That while one can certainly approach challenge, hardship, suffering, and disability as things to be resisted, overcome, and transcended, those aren’t the only options. Another valid...

While it’s easy to forget this side of New Year’s, we are still actually in the season of Christmas. Knowing that the marvel and wonder and mystery of the Incarnation can’t be comprehended too quickly, the Church established twelve days of Christmas that stretch from the Feast of the Incarnation, on December 25, to the day before the Epiphany of our Lord, on January 6. So on this the 9th day of Christmas, and anticipating the Epiphany celebration that falls this Sunday, I thought I would highlight one more Unlike Christmas Carol. This one also comes from A Very Special Christmas 3: Patti Smith’s version of “We Three...

I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...

I’m going to omit our usual Wednesday TEDTalks episode for a week or two to make a little more room for holiday cheer. Today’s feature…a modern day – and rockin’ – little drummer boy named Sean Quigley. Sean, a native of Winnipeg, put together a very fun – and very well made – video of his version of the “The Little Drummer Boy.” What’s kind of amazing is that he plays all the instruments as well as produced the video. And his exuberance as a drummer is, well, seriously fun. As he said in an interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) last year shortly after the video went up and went viral, “Drummer Boy...