Bad Priests

I’ve been thinking, recently, about the impact of bad priests on the Church. No, not on the Church – but on the lives of particular members of the Church, on the family and friends who have encountered them, who have…

Your Family Feast Days

The Catholic Church has taught that salvation is an ongoing process.  St. Paul, for example, uses past, present, and future tense at different points (c.f. Rom 8:24, 2 Cor 2:15, Rom 5:9). We have been saved, in the past, by…

Reconciling Love and Justice

Psalm 145:8-9 tells us that “the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness. The Lord is good to all and compassionate toward all his works.” Does this mean that God will forgive anything? He is…

Trusting God: An Interview with Connie Rossini

I recently had a chance to interview Connie Rossini, author of Five Lessons from the Carmelite Saints that will Change Your Life and Trusting God with St. Therese. She lived for many years as a secular member of the Discalced…

Smells & Bells

A common poor joke during my childhood was the “Catholic aerobics” we did at Mass: stand up-sit down-kneel-stand up-sit down-kneel. Now, I know that each posture has a meaning: we stand for the Gospel because it is Jesus speaking to…

Passing Time, Using Time

Summer is a good time to think about time. Some summer days, time seems to fly by and before we know it, the day is done.  On others, time seems to crawl as we struggle to finish a project, or…

This is My Body

We value very greatly our God-given rights. Some of these were enumerated beautifully in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. We value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jesus was – is – truly man, as well as truly God,…

God’s Chiseling

Every saint has a different story. One never hears a saint’s story and says, “this person was exactly like saint so-and-so”.  (Saint So-and-So – the patron of people that forget names.) They’re all different, including in the time it took…

One Ark, One Captain

Darren Aronofsky’s  Noah movie seems to be doing well in theaters, and with some Catholic critics, even if it didn’t get the papal thumbs-up they’d hoped for. To my knowledge, churchmen aren’t in the habit of making sponsorship deals–though I…

The Eyes of Love

How can this blemished church be Christ’s Church? How can this mountain of sinners be the city on a hill? The Catholic Church has many critics today. They often point to scars from the past and to wounds still healing…

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2019/11/09 By

Growth Beneath the Snow

“The plants were hidden under the snow. And the farmer…remarked with satisfaction: ‘Now they’re growing on the inside.’ I thought of…your forced inactivity…Tell me, are you also growing on the inside?” St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way, #294 The plants cannot…

2019/01/11 By

Physical minimalism, spiritual excess

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Seasons of Change and how, in the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis tells us that “(t)he horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable possessions we have produced in the…

2018/12/14 By

Faith in Receiving the Word

God asked faith of Abraham and Isaac. He asked it of St. John of the Cross, of Mother Theresa, and others. Sometimes their extreme examples seem just that — extreme. They seem to be on the edges of what’s possible,…

2018/11/09 By

Cowardice to Shame to Anger: A Lesson from Screwtape

“But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful–horrible to anticipate, horrible to feal, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses…

2018/10/12 By

There is No Third Way

Tertium non datur. That’s the law of the excluded middle. It is used in philosophy, especially logic, but there is a lot of other “middle” that we can exclude besides philosophy. In my last post, There is a Third Way,…

2018/06/08 By

There is a Third Way

A while back, I had an exchange with a disheartened young man. He said that he keeps encountering 5 types: “(o)ld, rambling and cynical men; bored, cliquey housewives; clueless and hard-headed men; disinterested and troubled women; and unhelpful, indifferent men…

2018/04/13 By

On Pride and Christian Privilege

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape educates a lesser demon on using a new Christian’s pride: “He must be made to feel (he’d better not put it in to words) ‘how different we Christians are’; and by ‘we Christians’…

2018/03/09 By

Seasons of Change

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis tells us that “(t)he horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable possessions we have produced in the human heart…” We hate monotony, sameness. Some of us constantly ask “what’s…

2018/02/09 By

Proof and Belief

In my last two posts, we’ve thought about the words “absolute” and “relative”, as well as “objective” and “subjective”. Another word that gets thrown around lightly is “proof”. “Set forth your case, says the Lord; bring your proofs, says the…

2017/10/13 By

Absolute Truth and Relativism

Last time, we thought about objective and subjective statements. Let’s look at a similar (and sometimes confused) pair of words: absolute and relative. Why do we care about these words? In 1884, Pope Leo XIII wrote against the relativistic philosophy…