Perspective
Learning how to saunter: the gifts of quarantine
Tonight, I wrote two events on my calendar: a birthday party and a baptism. They will be sanitized, scaled-down gatherings — and they will be fun — but still, it […]
Columns Archive
Perspective
The inoculation of sin
I’m a very sick man. In fact, I knock daily on death’s door. You see, I inherited it from my parents, and it has been in the family tree ever […]
The Sunday Gospel
The Lord asks us to take up our cross and follow Him
Thirteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time Matthew 10:37-42 This weekend’s first reading is from the first of two books in the Bible that bear a name suggesting that they are about […]
Perspective
It was a zebra, not a horse
This patient of mine was a huge man. He was 6-foot-4 and weighed 290 pounds. He did not look at all overweight. He was just big. He had significant coronary […]
The Sunday Gospel
The Lord protects and defends us in this life
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time Matthew 10:26-33 The Book of Jeremiah supplies this weekend’s first reading. Jeremiah wrote at a time when life was hard for God’s chosen people. Only […]
Perspective
Spiritual lessons from the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us with a great deal of uncertainty: uncertainty about how contagious the virus is and about the best way to treat it; uncertainty […]
Perspective
Resting in the Sacred Heart of Jesus
The past eight weeks have been unusual, to say the least. With schedules, lives and people’s world turned upside down, every person has been through a challenging time. A time […]
Perspective
Rooting out racism
My husband and daughter go for a walk nearly every day. I’ve never worried for their safety. Our neighborhood is pretty quiet. But in the past few weeks, I’ve also […]
The Sunday Gospel
Receiving the Eucharist is communion with Jesus
Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ John 6:51-58 This weekend, the Church celebrates the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, or as perhaps it is better […]
Perspective
Unused gifts of the Spirit in nonprofit Catholic business practices
Around the season of Pentecost, I try again to commit to memory the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. While we may not be able to recite the full […]
Perspective
Pentecost and the fires in our cities
It is in a way providential that the feast of Pentecost arrives this year just as our country is going through a convulsive social crisis. For the Holy Spirit, whose […]
A more human society
Two cheers for science
“At a time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is: science.” So begins a television ad that the Pfizer corporation began running in […]