After Mass on Sunday (January 3), a friend said, “Well, I’ve already failed at my New Year’s resolutions. What a relief! Now that’s done.” It’s become a sort of a necessary burden, to make New Year’s resolutions. That’s why I’ve waited a few days to talk about the New Year’s schtick… resolutions, goals, intentions, whatever…
More than ever this year, I’ve noticed how many people don’t celebrate, and perhaps even disdain, Christmas. I’ve even picked up some undercurrents of pride in the non-celebration, as though neglecting to observe Christmas is a sign of tolerance and high-mindedness. If all Christmas is, is decorations, lights, retail profits and consumer goods, then maybe…
Do you remember the Last Lecture series? Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburg would periodically select professors to give the lecture they would give if they only had one more chance to pass on their most important lessons. A computer science professor, Dr. Randy Pausch, was invited to give a Last Lecture, and after he had already…
This blog has been on holiday for a few weeks, recovering from the trip to Philadelphia. If you weren’t able to follow my Philly blog, you can still read it by clicking here. The Top 3 Things I learned from the World Meeting of Families and the Papal visit: The theology of the body was implicit…
The Elevator Pitch Part 3 “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” (St….
The Elevator Pitch Part 2 In the last post, we began building our elevator pitch about theology of the body. An elevator pitch has to be short enough to deliver in the space of an elevator ride; let’s call it two minutes. And in that two minutes, the pitch has to engage the other person,…
With this post, we’ll start to “drill down” to what theology of the body really means. It’s great news, like cold water to a thirsty soul, so we need to know how to share that excitement and vision with others. In this post, and for the next few weeks, I’ll deliver simple bullet points that…
Lately, I feel like a tiny rowboat out on a choppy sea. Wave after wave is coming at me. If you’ve been watching the headlines, you know what I’m talking about. I find myself constantly thinking, “Now I’ve seen everything; it can’t get any worse than this!” And then it does. As long as I’m…
Laudato Sí – part 3. In this third and final installment, the political aspects of Laudato Sí will be discussed in terms of classic Catholic social principles. It is impossible to get a balanced view of the Pope’s encyclical Laudato Sí from the secular press. They have dubbed it the “climate change encyclical”1 even though…
Laudato Sí, part 2 of a series We hear it every year on Holy Saturday, sitting in the dark of the church before the Light comes, a litany of all those things made in the Beginning through the Word: the swarms of living creatures, the winged birds, the creeping things and the beasts of the earth,…
