My friend a pastor received an irate email from a parishioner a Eucharistic minister At one of the previous weekend rsquo s Masses one too many ministers had arrived at the altar to distribute Holy Communion As the last to ascend he had been asked to return to the pew Understandably the eve

Hurricane Sandy can be pondered as a parable because like every parable it contained a paradox In this case one of power The hurricane reminded us of two distinct aspects of power it both savages and sustains life First the savaging Sandy schooled us again about the tremendous power late

A young man appeared at my office door Already a sign that something was up as today rsquo s students prefer to approach life electronically Why talk when you can text Even more ominously he had lowered his headphones Though I don rsquo t know him well he wanted to ask about his grandfather

Lance Corporal Lu Lobello was among the first marines to enter Saddam Hussein rsquo s Baghdad His detachment was assigned to assault a secret-police compound but as Fox Company entered an intersection near their target Corporal David Vidaria the radio operator fell backward shot in the head

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once made an observation that I rsquo ve often repeated in seemingly endless contexts a picture can hold you captive He meant that how we envision a thing can either limit or expand our understanding of it Take for instance your body Before you begin to co

A few weeks ago an unexpected email arrived leading to the smallest yet most treasured of discoveries It was akin to receiving an update from heaven specifically news of my father Not long ago I wrote a piece on scouting and Rich Meyer also a former member of Boy Scout Troop 153 saw the

Sister Leopoldina Burns recorded the event many years later when she was more than 65 years old Her English is a bit hard-pressed because she wrote late at night Twenty years in Hawaii and she was still working long days as a nurse A short distance from the office they entered a long narrow b

Sister Leopoldina Burns recorded the event many years later when she was more than 65 years old Her English is a bit hard-pressed because she wrote late at night Twenty years in Hawaii and she was still working long days as a nurse nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp

Sister Leopoldina Burns recorded the event many years later when she was more than 65 years old Her English is a bit hard-pressed because she wrote late at night Twenty years in Hawaii and she was still working long days as a nurse A short distance from the office they entered a long narrow b

There rsquo s something similar to ourselves in a saint something quite strange as well We heed our own humanity in a holy one but the familiar flows into the foreign It rsquo s as though in our encounter with the saint we espy two presences rather than one The person we see and another whom w