I’m an amateur artist. I love color, and I’ve always appreciated talented artists and their work. Sadly, I’m not a talented artist myself, nor have I been formally trained. The reason I paint is that my spiritual director, in the...
“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off, and if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” The hand, the foot, and the eye: three things...
A Reflection on Today’s Readings Recently, I was playing a form of Bible roulette. If you have not heard the term before, it is a reference to when someone points to a random verse in the Bible and tries to...
About a year and a half ago, I wrote an article on the Samaritan woman of the Gospels in connection with the Holy Father’s 2021 opening of the ordinary ministry of acolyte and lector to women of good character. Taken alongside his establishment of...
When the world is in greatest confusion, visionaries become oracles. Panic, like every other passion, blinds the intelligence of man, and he is glad to take refuge from everything that bewilders him by giving it a ‘supernatural’ interpretation. -Fr. Marie...
I have never done a DNA test and I probably never will, but I don’t need one to know that I am an ethnical hodge-podge. On one side, I am descended from Italians from the south of Italy along the...
I have little use for the British royalty. I really don’t. I could care less who is in line for what role, and who is feuding with whom. It’s hard for me to believe that the British Parliament forks over...
Catholicism’s literary tradition is the envy of many other religions. It extends from medieval verse epics right through to modern novels. Pope Francis acknowledged this earlier this month in an interesting letter on “the role of literature in formation,” primarily...
There is a saying that I often ponder: “Tell me what you love, and I will tell you who you are.” This is very close to Jesus’ statement, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6,...
This is the third article in the series “Spiritual Challenges.” In the first article, “Lessons From a Bowl of Jello,” I presented my opinion that one cause of the turmoil after Vatican II is that we had not let ourselves...
The Justifying Power of Mercy Some years ago, I read about this incident at a middle school: a boy, who was about ten years old, was suspected of stealing. One day, at the end of class, his teacher called him...
It was always a lot of fun teaching philosophy and showing students how human reason is able to demonstrate the existence of God, just through deductive reasoning alone, especially Leibniz’ proof: “If the Necessary being is possible, then it exists.”...
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