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“The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.” This short passage from Mark’s Gospel is all we get from him on the temptation in the desert that Matthew, Mark and Luke all…
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Unpaint the rock. One of the things I noticed during the 2020 Pandemic Virtual College Tour is that several of the dozens of schools Betsy and I virtually visited share a tradition of painting a rock. In one case, we actually visited a campus in real life that had a rock like this, but we…
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How did we get here? I. A few years ago, I started studying deaths of despair: drug overdoses, suicides, extremist violence, mass violence, gang violence. I wanted to know what draws people to these awful ends. And whether it was those who work in gang intervention programs or those who work with people trying to…
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Messed up.* There’s a great podcast by America Media called Imagine that offers a series of guided reflections in a Jesuit prayer tradition in which you put yourself in the scene of a Biblical story. The first season walked with Jesus from his Baptism through his Resurrection. This season focuses on the Christmas story, and…
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What if your real enemies are all inside you? Let me confess something: I’ve been running short on hope as of late. I won’t rehearse the reasons why; you know them, if you look around. I’ve also been wrestling with peace lately, which, well, is counterintuitive. But as much as I am reminded that I…
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There’s a mantra of sorts in Jesuit spirituality about finding God in all things, and a question I’ve been reflecting on these days is this: “Where does my baggage blind me from seeing God in all things, and especially in all people?” This popped up for me in the wake of my gushing about the…
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The Gospel of Ted Lasso “Come, Holy Spirit, show us your beauty, reflected in all the peoples of the earth, so that we may discover anew that all are important and all are necessary, different faces of the one humanity that God so loves. Amen.” (Pope Francis, Closing Prayer, Fratelli Tutti) The readings for the first two weeks of…
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In my own unpopular opinion, the Tampa Bay Times uncovered the wrong scandal. Recently, the Times launched a series on Pasco County Sheriff’s efforts at “intelligent policing”, and this week their front-page addition to the series focused on the Sheriff’s efforts to identify teenagers who might become criminals by cross-referencing school data (grades, attendance), police…
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Really? Maybe this is only my experience, but as I reflect on Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti, I find myself having this recurring emotional reaction: Really? Where I want to walk away in resignation or disgust, Francis keeps making points that a) I know are true and b) mean I can’t walk away. It’s awfully…
