January 23, 2021

Column: Listening Better to the Blues

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

Column: COVID-19 and Character

“Tell me,” Albert Camus’ Clamence asks, “doesn’t shame sting a little?”
November 19, 2020

Column: Catholics and Presidents

What to make of a Catholic president?
October 31, 2020

Column: Fire and Brimstone: Tips for Preaching the End Times

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

Column: What If We Lose Touch?

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, 2020

Column: The Poor are the Altar of God

The poor are the altar of God.
September 24, 2021

Homily: What We Do With Truth

There’s a story by the great Lebanese writer, Kahlil Gibran, called “John the Madman.”
October 2, 2021

Homily: The Only Sort of Love God Is

It’s unlikely you’ve heard of John Beukels, the charismatic Anabaptist leader of the German city of Münster in the 1530s, from the early years of the Reformation.
October 10, 2021

Homily: The Car and the Parish

A century ago, the big issue, for Catholics and Protestants alike, was the automobile. The Spanish Flu, of course, was a problem too, killing millions as it did. Yet it was the automobile that was a more enduring threat some thought, more of a game changer.
October 17, 2021

Homily: Sacrifice Status

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the “drum major instinct.”
November 14, 2021

Homily: Choices Will Have To Be Made

January 28, 2024

Homily: What to Preach When you Can’t Think of What to Preach

Lacking much rhetorical invention this week, I thought I’d pull back the curtain in his homily and make it more of a “how-to,” or a homily about a homily or something like that. That is, I thought it interesting (at least for me) to share with you how I go about thinking up and writing a […]