Blog
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 […]
April 10, 2019
My name’s Josh…Fr. Josh. And I’m a priest, a preacher. I talk and write a lot. I’ve built a website, this one. My hope is that it’ll help me share, all in one place, cool and helpful things: homilies, reflections, talks, articles I’ve written, and so on. But also, more broadly, I want it to be […]
April 22, 2019
In the Seventh Circle of Hell, in Dante’s Inferno, in the circle of violence, is a rockslide, rubble as from an earthquake. It wasn’t always ruinous like this, this part of hell. It’s new, Virgil tells Dante; it wasn’t there the last time he came through. Earlier, Virgil had talked about it, the moment hell shook. […]
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 […]
April 28, 2019
I call it the Second Struggle. After Easter, Peter and the disciples still needed to grow.
