advent
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 8, 2019
To listen to this homily click here. Yves Congar, the great twentieth century Dominican theologian, in a book he wrote a little more than a decade before the Second Vatican Council (a book which by the way influenced the future Pope John XXIII), said in rather a matter of fact way, but mystically nonetheless, that “Prophecy […]
December 9, 2019
It’s beautiful, really. The Church seems to say that if you know anything about parental love, then you know about grace. If either you’re a parent yourself, or if you have been blessed by the genuine love of your mother or father; then, the Church suggests, you already know a great deal about the grace of […]
December 12, 2019
Where Christ is, there is healing. That’s how we know he’s present.
December 20, 2019
Matthew tells us Joseph was “righteous.” Which means, being a good Jew, that he was righteous before not only God, but the Law.
December 22, 2019
It should be required reading, I think, for members of the clergy: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, that masterpiece of American literature and of the American psyche.
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.