These Stone Walls' Second Annual Stuck Inside Literary Award
. . . We are caught up on this same road. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our entire life as individuals and as a Catholic community comes down to one crucial element: we are either instruments for the proliferation of evil or instruments for its defeat. None of the petty squabbles, devastating scandals, and addictive diversions that muddle us in the muck on this long, long road will come to mean very much in the end. We are instruments, and instruments of what depends entirely on our response to grace. This is the tale of The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R.Tolkien brings his characters again and again to the very brink of hopelessness, only to teach them - and us - that there is always hope. We cannot accept that there was, and is, a Christ without accepting that one true fact. To be without hope means to admit there is no grace at work in the world, and that is simply pointless, and demonstrably untrue. . . .
These Stone Walls: More Loose Ends and Dangling Participles
. . . Somehow, at some point when I wasn’t looking, These Stone Walls became noticed, and it seemed to happen suddenly. In the last few weeks, some friends who keep track of such things have told me something astonishing. TSW is showing up on the first page in a number of Google searches. As a prisoner with zero access to the Internet, I can be forgiven for not having noticed. Google didn’t even exist when I was sent to prison, and the Internet was in its virtual toddlerhood. . . .