faith
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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…
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Do you trust me? I don’t know if you ever have this experience, but I have found that some themes, questions, and challenges keep coming back to me, generally because I haven’t satisfactorily addressed them before. How many times have we committed to getting to Mass early, or at least on time? How many times…
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Be like … Paul? Even though Paul was my father’s name, my middle name, my confirmation name, and the author of half the New Testament books, he’s not one of my favorite saints. He was crazy smart and went non-stop, but it’s hard to read his letters without thinking he was also really high drama.…
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So what? Last Sunday was the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity for Catholics – basically there’s a lineup of deep-topic feast days on Sundays from Ascension to Pentecost to Trinity Sunday to Corpus Christi that celebrate different important but hard to grasp theological concepts. If you are the type that thinks that faith is…
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I never intended to become the Papal Meme Police. I blame Esteban for turning me into an internet Javert. It started after the death of Pope Francis, when my social media feed was filled with friends posting the heartwarming yet completely false story of Esteban, the alleged dog who refused to leave the side of…
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“My sheep hear my voice.” – John 10:27 I wanted to return to something Pope Leo XIV said to the College of Cardinals in his meeting with them on the day after his election. In what seems to be his first draft of a program for his papacy, Leo underscored his commitment to build on…
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Better him than me. Before I dig into something Pope Leo XIV said to the College of Cardinals over the weekend in another post, I just wanted to take a moment of gratitude that I don’t have his job. Today he had a meeting with some of the 6,000 accredited media who have been covering…
Reading Francis 