Homilies
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 […]
May 26, 2019
The guardians of Plato’s just city had to be brave.
June 8, 2019
I always think of Saint Philip Neri around Pentecost. You might’ve not heard of him; he’s less popular these days than he used to be.
June 15, 2019
Today we celebrate the most Holy Trinity, the Catholic dogma of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We must admit, though, it’s something of a troublesome dogma, difficult if not embarrassing for some. It’s always been so.
June 30, 2019
Simone Weil, that eccentric and brilliant woman, said once, rather famously, that it was “more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin.” Contemplating sin risked pride, she said; admitting failure due to “sheer stupidity,” on the other hand, the bad results of our plain mediocrity: “No knowledge is more to be desired,” she wrote. Because […]
July 14, 2019
“Telescopic Philanthropy” is what Charles Dickens called it.
July 20, 2019
An old politician was beginning to lose his hearing.