Looking for the invisible …

… Can’t Explain — ‘Hotly in Pursuit of the Real’. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… one should not underestimate the strangeness of Mariette to its audience in 1991, even to some Catholics: it was already some decades since Vatican II’s reforms and the more complete integration of Catholics into American life. A novel about an ecstatic nun in 1906, where even the unecstatic ones wear cinctures, was bound to remind people that Catholicism can be odd. Among the other striking passages in Mariette is one in which Hansen recounts a discussion between two nuns about their lives before they entered the convent: “We talked about our childhoods.... She played in a habit just like the one that her sister wore. She whipped herself with knotted apron strings. She rebuked temptations against chastity by lying naked on thorns.” And this is before we get to the stigmata.