Peace Is Achieved in Respectful Conflict
Our world is in need of peace. All around the globe, and especially in the United States, we see the rotten fruits of a society that is not at peace. There is violence in the streets, rage on social media,...
Category: Reflection
Contempt is not the way of Christ
Sometime after the 2012 US election, I made a commitment that has continued to inform my conscience and my approach to politics and society ever since: I chose to step away. I was something of a political news junkie for...
All Souls’ Day: The Faithful Departed and Us
Death is inevitable. For the bulk of human history, this has been a universally acknowledged and widely emphasized truism. Victorious Roman generals, as they paraded through the city in triumph, would be accompanied by someone whose job it was to...
Saints All, Saints Here and Now
A reflection on the Sunday readings for November 1, 2020 All Saints’ Day has a very long and interesting history. While the exact origin of this feast is unclear, historians believe that it began organically at the end of the Christian...
We Are All Penguins and Lobsters
God’s continuous act of separation occurs in the so-called first creation account of Genesis (Gen 1:1–2:3): light from darkness, water from water, water from land. This act of separation provides form to the formless, and as creation proceeds so too...
Black Catholics Arise
This morning, my local ordinary, Washington’s Archbishop Wilton Gregory, was named by Pope Francis as one of 13 new cardinals who will be elevated during a November 28 consistory in Rome. Archbishop Gregory has served the Church for many years...
Practical Atheists, Religious People, or People of Faith?
A reflection on the Sunday readings for October 25, 2020 When couples approach me for marriage preparation, they must complete a pre-nuptial inventory form. One part of the inventory concerns the couple’s “spiritual assessment.” Among the questions in this segment is...
Towards an Inclusive Capitalism
One key to understanding the Church’s teaching on the economy is to ask—as Francis does in Fratelli Tutti—whether we “include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside” (FT 69). This is, of course, a reference to the parable of...
A Love Letter to my Catholic Friends
I see you. You were brought up with CCD and Sunday Mass and played Necco wafer communion. You gave up candy for Lent, ate fish sticks on Fridays, and know what “Holy Day of Obligation” means (get thyself to church). Your...
Fratelli Tutti: Pope Francis’s Love Letter to the World
Fratelli Tutti is a signature encyclical—not only of Francis’s papacy, but for the Catholic Church. During a pandemic, when the world seems to be at a political, social, religious, and ecological tipping point, comes a papal encyclical on “fraternity” and...
Dubious Suspicions: My Journey Back to Pope Francis
I offer here a sketch of someone caught in the eddies of our time. A sketch because it is not complete; I am still in the midst of confusion and uncertainty. But something of an outline is taking shape, and...
An invitation to the Wedding Feast of the Lord
A reflection on the Mass readings for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. At my parish, I am currently leading an eight-week series on St. John of the Cross. John’s poems are all brilliant, but the ones that are the...
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