Posted inThe Good Word

Telling Time in Birmingham

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

Posted inThe Good Word

The Good is Diffusive

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

Posted inThe Good Word

Someone So Different

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

Posted inThe Good Word

Headed Downstream

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

Posted inIn All Things

The Terrible Beauty

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

Posted inThe Good Word

The Virtue of Suppleness

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

Posted inThe Good Word

When God Disappoints

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

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