We desperately want someone to gather together both the disparate pieces of our personal lives and our planet’s history. One could say that we want someone to harvest history, our own and that of the world. And here’s the truth: the Church recognizes that harvester in the person of Jesus the Christ, the one whom the scriptures call the Alpha and the Omega of time.

The problem with parables is presumption Hearing them we assume they rsquo re meant for another For example we take for granted that we are wisely investing the talents that God has given We simply assume that we rsquo re like the Good Wife from Proverbs busy with our worthy labors But th

Years ago I served as a dean of students in a seminary college I was surprised perhaps because of my own youth to discover a number of dysfunctions among our students I was particularly amazed by the abuse of alcohol which seemed little different from any other college campuses despite our

To respond he wrote in the margins of the newspaper he was reading and then on a piece of paper proffered him by a black guard and finally on a pad given to him by his attorneys He wrote My Dear Fellow Clergymen While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail I came across your recent statem

Plato was the first to suggest that the good is diffusive It rsquo s in the very nature of the good to expand to pour itself out Why Of course the ancient Greeks could go no farther than to identify the nature of a thing with what it must be what it is continually is The good simply is dif

Did I ever tell you about my friend Lynn Leibovitz We met in Florence I had finished two semesters of theological studies in Rome and after a year of listening to Jesuits lecturing in Italian a year I passed either writing aerograms or crying I decided that I could definitely use more Itali

Profound insights into human life often come when a novelist offers us a scene that is initially hard to imagine at least until we rsquo ve entered it through the writer rsquo s craft Then it suddenly seems patent and true And when the author is a great one the gospel itself is proclaimed beca

Here rsquo s how his first biographer Thomas of Celano records the encounter of St Francis of Assisi with the crucifix now famous but then hanging forlorn in the crumbling Umbrian church of San Damiano He write that Francis was walking one day by the church of San Damiano which was aband

Charles Sumner was a man of vision The senator from Massachusetts knew that slavery was wrong He devoted his fiery oratory to denouncing the profound evil it represented but Charles Sumner lacked a virtue I would call suppleness What is that It rsquo s a combination of the classical virtues It

What will you do when the rapture comes If you aren rsquo t a fundamentalist Christian one who reads the Bible literally you rsquo re probably not preparing to be seized by Christ and taken up into heaven before closing tribulations fall upon the world Of course if the novelist Tom Perotta is