Since the death of Christopher Hitchens in December of 2011, I have anticipated some kind of cinematic retrospective regarding the life of a man who was one of the great intellectual lights of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Certainly there have been tributes and brief snapshots highlighting his spoken word, writings and debates on YouTube and elsewhere, but nothing which attempts to comprehensively represent at least in brief the fulsome cornucopia Hitchens brought to humankind.…

I have just finished watching a wonderfully done yet singularly disturbing piece: the HBO documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.  In it, writer/director Alex Gibney exposes the depravity of the catholic church regarding sexual child abuse by priests, particularly but not exclusively in its defense of one Father Lawrence Murphy, who had a two-decade history of such abuse at the St. John’s School for Deaf Children near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



There is no way…