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I ought not be here. As I contemplate 50, the first birthday I will celebrate without a living parent, the same thought recurs that has struck me on most birthdays of my adult life, but maybe with a little extra poignancy. I ought not be here. I can’t speak for others, but for me, being…
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”Deaths of despair” have been in the news a lot the last couple of years, and especially with the recent announcement that US life expectancy has gone down for the third year in a row, attributed to drug addiction and suicide. Let me take a minute to lay out that, to the extent that these…
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When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They…
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I’m posting this here, but it’s entirely the work of Michael Bayer (@mbayer1248), who posted it on a Twitter thread and gave me permission to replicate it here for the blessed among you who don’t do Twitter. I cleaned up the formatting a little to translate tweets to more common grammar, but otherwise have left…
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There’s kind of a lot for a somewhat vocal Catholic convert to react to today. I’m still processing the news of yesterday’s Pennsylvania grand jury report documenting graphic allegations by more than 1,000 victims over 70 years against more than 300 priests in six of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses. I feel the need to say something,…
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I really intended to focus on something else, and hopefully I’ll get back to it at some point, but Pope Francis went and released a new document, an apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness, and I can’t just ignore it. An apostolic exhortation is a teaching document, which is to say it isn’t intended…
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One of my Lenten things, one I actually did, was read through Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life again, for the first time in several years. Since I use his 5-fold framework for the Christian life – worship, community, discipleship, service, witness – as an examination of conscience on an ongoing basis, it wasn’t surprising, but his,…
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How many kinds of people do you see? I notice that a lot of people see two kinds of people: Good People and Evil People. Some people see only one kind of people: We are all basically the same, even though our background and experiences shape us a little and our choices can shape our…
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From Now On (with a great backstory) This last song on the soundtrack seems, in some ways, the most “gospel-y.” There’s a little flourish in the piano before the first chorus that has a gospel flair, and the sound, once the song gets ramped up, is very reminiscent of contemporary Christian music’s Rend Collective. The theme…
Reading Francis 