faith
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What must it be like to fall apart in front of tens of thousands of people? What must it be like to be a performer, on-stage, unable to sing the song you made, the one that made you famous? Sometimes people who aren’t religious think that Christians have a delusional sense that, with enough belief,
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Pope Leo has asked Catholics to pray the rosary every day in October as a call for peace. I’ve never really been one to pray the rosary. As a convert, I didn’t grow up with the devotion, and I’m still pretty sure I don’t have the whole order of prayers quite right. Beyond that, rote
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At what point do our scruples do more harm than good? Scrupulosity is not a term you hear a lot these days, even though I think it’s a burgeoning condition now in both secular and sacred circles. (We tend to go with the more pathological term, OCD.) Back in the day, Jesus poked at the
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To whom do we belong? I’ve been thinking a lot about a truism about religion that social scientists point out. For most of us, our faith (including secularism as a form of faith) isn’t so much something we adopt through reason, or something to whose principles we assent cognitively. Instead, for most of us, we
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It was a murder so heinous that it shocked the nation. So much did it command the national attention that, even in a gun-soaked country grown weary of mass shootings, the President of the United States traveled to join family members in mourning the lost. Staggering everyone, the spouse of the victim forgave the killer.
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The Bible readings that Catholics use at Mass this week are an interesting mix that, taken together, seem to underscore that God sees things very differently than the culture around us does. There’s a passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy that actually shows up twice, in the Monday daily Mass and then again this
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He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. – Colossians 1:17 This verse is part of a hymn about Christ that St. Paul quotes at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians. It’s a bold theological statement about the second person of the Trinity – that Christ, who we Christians
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What does it mean, really, for Christianity to be countercultural? One thing you hear a lot in Christian circles is that Christians are called to be countercultural. Usually (like virtually all things American), this notion means something different, depending on which side of our societal divide you inhabit. Traditionalist Christians tend to equate being countercultural
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Last Sunday’s Old Testament passage from Deuteronomy was a beautiful passage from Moses on how the law of God is written on our hearts, and the Gospel was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, so my guess is that nobody paid much attention to the second reading, Colossians 1:15-20. But Paul says something interesting in
Reading Francis 