god
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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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The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing. I mentioned earlier this week that the daily Mass readings this week cover the return to Jerusalem and rebuilding of the Temple, but one of those readings has really stuck with me all week, because I think it speaks to a larger question…
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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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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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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’m glad I’m not a Catholic bishop in the US. In the Gospels, Jesus saves his harshest words for religious leaders that lead their followers astray. I think especially of Matthew 18, where, after saying that his followers should humble themselves like a little child, he says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who…
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A couple quick things about the readings chosen by the Church for the 4th Sunday of Lent (which was today). The Gospel is the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15, one of the most famous stories Jesus tells. It’s worth noting (I think I heard Luke Johnson say this) that the context for…
Reading Francis 