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 […]
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]
July 28, 2024
Speaking of Moses and the manna given in the desert all those years ago, Jesus said, “You know, the bread your fathers ate in the desert didn’t last. They all died.”[1] It was, although miraculously delivered, just ordinary bread. And then he began to speak about his heavenly Father and the bread that he gives—not ordinary […]
June 2, 2024
Jesus Christ, risen and ascended: by the gift of the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost, the gift of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit who is God—a Trinity—he comes to us today, our Lord, every day, as food, as silent food and drink. Into a world often too busy to notice, before hearts which […]
May 25, 2024
I have a thing for artists—poets, painters, people like that.
May 19, 2024
I’m sure I’ve told this story before, about an old priest from Cilicia in southern Anatolia. It was centuries ago.