Desire has a bad press. Most of us, at least those beyond a certain age, have grown up thinking that anything we desire is probably something we shouldn’t even be thinking about, and whatever God’s will might be, it is surely diametrically opposed to what we actually want.

Global warming just got personal. Our neighbor is moving because of global warming. As the world warms, small degrees of temperature change bring changes in the weather. Ice caps melt, seas rise, weather patterns become less predictable, storms become more destructive, and coastal peoples and proper

Under the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas, I hold that a soul is a unifying formative source of any living being’s activities and purpose. Thus each individual plant or tree has a soul, a formative cause of its integrated development in its life-activities of growth, healing and reproduction.

Public apologies are all the rage these days, so much so that it’s hard to find a celebrity or newsmaker who hasn’t visited the high priests of the secular confessional, Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, to beg for forgiveness for some petty offense. But the trend is hardly limited to indivi

Lent can be a disorienting, dislocating time, and sometimes it seems that it observes us more than we observe it. Twice recently I had the feeling that Lent was observing me and gently tweaking at my mind and heart, not without a smile on its face. The first of these moments happened in the middle o

More than a quarter-century ago, the Archdiocese of Chicago embarked on what must have seemed a radical idea at the time: catechetical barhopping. Well, that’s probably a bit too glib and irreverent. But it’s also not far from the truth. The program, after all, was called Theology on Tap