Joshua Whitfield
May 30, 2019
Truth is a writer’s first responsibility. To conquer the lie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.
May 22, 2019
Maggie Whitfield interviews Melanie Newman of the Salem Red Sox…
April 22, 2019
It is hard to describe the loss of Notre Dame. When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived in Paris, each evening on his way home, he stopped as he crossed the Siene on the Île de la Cité to watch the sun set over Notre Dame. The darkening ancient towers silent against the new, awakening, electric […]
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.