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 […]
December 15, 2024
Close readers of Luke will recall that the question we hear asked today, the question—“What then shall we do?”—which is found in Luke 3:10, is the same question found in Acts 2:37.
December 1, 2024
As the beginning of Advent, the lesson each year is to watch, the question is, Watch for what? To cut to the chase, to be as brief and simple as possible, the question the Church asks this first Sunday of Advent is always something like that.
November 4, 2024
They are the poets that help me—when I have no other way to make sense of it—to feel my way through death: to the love hidden underneath tears, when common words do not help. It’s not that they heal at all—what these poets say—instead, they help me feel. Which is I think the first thing we […]
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.