I have just returned from seeing the rock group Rush perform a more than three-hour concert in Concord California thus marking at least the dozenth time maybe closer to 15th or 20th that I ve seen them live since my first Rush show around 1986 After spending the evening with so many for wh

On Monday I gave a talk to an assembly conference of a couple hundred high school students from Catholic schools in San Francisco with my assigned topic being sexuality and spirituality today With all the caveats about the potential minefields assumed it was also an exciting opportunity to try

A common trope of professorial reportage is the moment of illumination about the shape of undergraduate life today the classroom surprise that at best can become a theophany for future teaching I had such an experience last week in my introductory course on Christianity While reaching for exa

I ve spent the last 60 hours amidst the wild diversity that is the Catholic Church and that is manifest so beautifully here at the annual Religious Education Congress Five students from Santa Clara University have traveled here with me and have been taking in all that the Congress has to offe

In a few days I head out to the annual Los Angeles Religious Education Congress a grand carnival of Catholic spirit people ideas books and prayers that span and exceed the various confessional ecclesiological political spectrums of North American Catholicism It is the only annual Catholic

Tonight I gave a presentation to a group of students and staff at Santa Clara regarding recent research on the relationship between spiritual practice and sexual decision-making in the lives of college students No one who works with the current generation of college students will be surprised t

Greetings from Reno Nevada where I gave two talks today at the Annual Diocesan Conference actually its 25th anniversary with the theme of Integrity Rooted in the Soul It is a beautiful cross-section of the Church as it lives on the ground and I am surprised by how midwestern in their ni

Over the last several months the news has been full of examples of institutions of higher education led most recently by Harvard changing their tuition policies as a way of reconsidering the negative effects of the exorbitant cost of college education in the United States Is anyone else disapp

This is my first ever entry on a blog and while I am happy to be doing so in such good company my happiness is not untethered from an ongoing ambivalence about the blogosphere in particular and the Internet in general As the recent book Cult of the Amateur Doubleday 2007 by Andrew Keen

In early January of 2003, I was at dinner with Martina, who is now my wife, when I noticed a lump on the right side of my collarbone. It felt tough and nodular, but there was no pain. Martina and I tried to have a normal dinner, but concern got the best of us, and we dropped the rest of our evening