No one would argue, it’s been the season for natural disasters. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Katia struck like balls in a batting cage, wham, wham, wham. In the middle of that ferocious fortnight, Mexico suffered a gigantic earthquake. (For perspective, the San Francisco quake that struck during Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, termed…
In the middle of the devastating news coming from south Texas this week, there’s strangely been an undercurrent of goodness. An entire city virtually disappeared under water, but on the news we see nobility on a grand scale. It’s not the usual parade of human beings at their worst. Ever since Harvey made first landfall,…
At TOBET, one of the most frequent and desperate pleas for help that we hear concerns pornography. It’s snagging our young men, beginning around age 8 (and even some girls and women are being pulled in). If your son or grandson has a smartphone or tablet (without filtering software), be assured, he is seeing these…
TOBET got a jolt of theological caffeine over the July 4th weekend! That is, we were invited to participate in the Convocation of Catholic Leaders in Orlando, sponsored by the USCCB and totally exceeding all our expectations. This event didn’t appear on CNN or 60 Minutes, but it was BIG. Whenever the whole conference of…
This past January, I received a “death threat” via Facebook… my first. Ironically, it was issued because I am pro-life. I laughed it off, because the authors were some middle-aged Northeastern women from the so-called peaceful “Women’s March.” I brashly thought, “Go ahead, make my day.” Being a marathon runner, I figured I could at…
Like every other Christian, I’ve been on a quest for years, for the perfect spiritual Christmas. It’s an admirable search, but Christmas is not solely a spiritual event. It’s about a body. God was already “with us” in Old Testament times, before the birth of Jesus. God hovered over the Ark of the Covenant. The…
This week will bring change, of the sort none of us can comfortably predict. Whatever happens on Tuesday, our nation will reap what has been sown. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora can’t stuff it all back down in the box. We’ve sown a disregard for authority; we’ll reap a lawless society. We’ve…
“Like many young women, I wanted more than anything to attract men. I tried to fill the space inside of me with flirtations and flings and, truth be told, <sex>. I felt sure that if I persuaded a man to love me, I would feel complete, worthy. Of course, like many young women do, I…
The biggest event in the world this week isn’t occurring in Philadelphia, or anywhere else in politics-torn America. Nope, the biggest event is the 2.5 million young people who have traveled from all over the world to Kraków, Poland this week for the 31st year of World Youth Day. Poland has had to fight and suffer a lot…
There’s a brittle quality about us these days. We’ve had to submit to one outrage after another, week after numbing week and the intervals between gut-wrenching ordeals are getting shorter. The life-and-death, decency-shredding circumstances that we face don’t give us a break to recover ourselves; they’re coming at us like a polluted river that’s overflowed…
