Since retiring from my job, my husband has found me irritating. We had a talk (after fighting), and he is right: I am mothering him. Smothering him. “I have a mother,” he said. “I want a wife, a partner, a best friend.”

That woman is in so many parishes, right there beneath the exit sign and almost out the door, singing while the roof gets ripped off and the sky falls.

Before long I had tears in my eyes—and not from the uneven grooves worn into the wood by pilgrims’ knees. Something about the physical discomfort helped me to focus on the much greater pain Jesus had felt on those same stairs.

The most compelling reason not to execute the convicted is an existential one: We humans are not God.

In the culture of the shout, the intimate heat of the crucible of suffering is replaced by the heat of the Klieg lights, which reveal without transforming.

The second of Rome’s station churches is dedicated to a soldier-saint, George of Lydda. Soldier-martyrs seem to have left a particular mark on the memory of Roman Christians.