Joshua Whitfield
March 16, 2020
It was inevitable, a question of when and not if.
February 28, 2020
Maybe there just aren’t saints anymore. Maybe there never were.
February 21, 2020
Think with me, please, on the organ and the organist. There’s something to learn.
January 17, 2020
What if, saving our bodies, we destroy our souls?
December 20, 2019
Can we imagine enemies as friends, or an addict who’s finally free? What about your husband, your wife, your own hard heart? Can you imagine these surprisingly new? What about us? Can we imagine ourselves beautifully better, different? Can we conceive it? Is it even sensible to try, to ask these questions of hope?
December 24, 2024
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian, said once that the Christmas homily should be brief—shorter than normal.
December 22, 2024
Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, said once that “The Shekinah is between beings.”[1] Now the word Shekinah is sometimes translated “glory,” yet it is not some ordinary glory but the glory of the presence of God, the dwelling of God; the idea is kind of synonymous with the “word” of God or even the “face” […]
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.