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OK, so, when you’re too sick to go to any of the Christmas masses, part of the makeup assignment is to read the readings for all the variations of masses – Christmas Eve vigil, Christmas mass during the night, Christmas mass at dawn (which probably isn’t too crowded), Christmas mass during the day. It’s not…
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This year, I sort of missed Christmas. For whatever reason, it seems like Christmas is a time when people in our family get sick. For some, it’s the pace of work at the end of the year; my sister-in-law who worked in bookstores often collapsed when the stores finally closed for Christmas, for instance. For…
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To love is to pay joyful attention to another in ways that communicate mutual belonging, inherent mattering, and gratitude. After finishing Fr. Greg Boyle’s latest book, Cherished Belonging, I found myself searching for a better definition of love. The classical Christian definition from St. Thomas Aquinas, to love is to will the good of another,…
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The readings that the Catholic Church uses for Sunday Mass and the ones it chooses for daily Mass don’t intentionally line up; the daily readings generally work slowly through a Gospel and another book of the Bible, while the ones on Sunday will work through a Gospel and another book of the New Testament, with…
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At our core, we don’t have a political problem. We have an idolatry problem. In the wake of the shooting of former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, there have been many new calls to return civility to politics. Before we can hope to regain civility, much less the focus on the common good,…
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Get out of the way. There’s a little story in Mark (10:46-52, this Sunday’s Gospel for you Catholics) about the healing of a blind man named Bartimaeus. It’s a pretty straightforward story that only takes a couple of verses, but even a small story like this has details worth reflecting on. Jesus and a crowd…
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Why should you read this book? This is less of a rhetorical question than it sounds, and I hope you’ll let me know if you figure out a good answer. But let me offer that my purpose in sharing this is to tell a bit of my story in hopes that you might share some…
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Who do you look like? They say couples that have been together for a long time start to look like each other. I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know that, if not in physical ways, it’s part of human nature that we start to resemble the people we focus our attention on,…
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I wrote Abandoning Temples because my friends encouraged me to write a book, and this is the book I had in me, apparently. Once I went through the trouble of writing and publishing a book, though, I realized that I’d really like people beyond my friends to buy it and read it. So I’m committed…
