Joshua Whitfield
January 23, 2021
Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
November 23, 2020
“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
October 31, 2020
Dwight Moody, the great revivalist, appreciated fire and brimstone. He knew nothing better, he said, than the notion “that Our Lord is coming again” to “take the men of this world out of their stocks and bonds.” As a preacher, he knew it worked, that it moved souls.
May 14, 2020
Making readers like me of George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin highly uncomfortable, a San Diego company has developed a technology to monitor social distance. Already in use in some places, it’s called Active Distance Alert and Monitoring, or ADAM, eerily, for short. The technology maps signals emitted by phones, so that crowded areas like grocery stores […]
November 3, 2024
I want to talk about that good and necessary part of our life together as a parish, and that’s about stewardship. I am preaching at most Masses this weekend—mainly because I like preaching but also because this is a really important matter for our life together.
October 6, 2024
Of course, the Lord’s words in today’s gospel are difficult to hear.
September 29, 2024
To be a Christian, to be moral at all: it requires that you have the capacity to see.
September 8, 2024
The passage from Isaiah and the passage from Mark, put together as they are today, mean to tell us something.
September 1, 2024
It’s good to wash your hands; cleanliness is good. To wash your hands engaged in divine worship, that’s good too. The Pharisees here were not altogether wrong; your mother wasn’t wrong when she told you to wash your hands. The disciples didn’t wash their hands. Maybe they should have. I wash my hands before Mass, before […]
August 4, 2024
What surprises me each time I read it is what they said to him, what they asked him: “Sir, give us this bread always.”[1]