Awailing ululation echoes across the night as I trudge up the sandy hill, the Muslim call to prayer that signals the end of the day. As I crest the hill, I pause to catch my breath. The thin air at this altitude makes any form of physical exertion a daunting task. The wind blows, and a whisper of sa
Faith in Focus
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Going Home From Prison: Postlude
Today I failed that easy command of St. Paul, Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. While inmates at the prison where I work were smiling and rejoicing, I was on the verge of tears. It happened this way. Shortly after arriving at the prison, I noticed three inmates standing with
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Collateral Damage: How One Priest Feels These Days
In my 32 years as a priest, I have been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, have been thrown out of a ministerial association because I am a Catholic, have had fundamentalist preachers run me down by name on the radio and have had a knife pulled on me in church for a homily I gave. I have also seen one
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God in the Tangled Sheets
If marriage is a source of sacramental grace, why are we as a church so uncomfortable about sex?
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What I learned from my cat about the God who created us
I learned a lot about being from my cat Goose; I learned also something about how God regards our being, delighting in the work of his hands and the extraordinary beauty of our ordinary lives.
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Learning and Teaching
I walked across the deck of the pool at Flick Park, one of the public pools in Glenview, the embryonic suburb north of Chicago where I spent the first 18 years of my life. Little children splashed their way through the kiddie pool on my right. I was there with some friends headed for the water slide
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South Bronx Funeral
Once I finally found the street in the South Bronx for which I had been searching, I almost immediately spotted my destination, a funeral home. From my vantage point inside the car, it looked like little more than a storefront, wedged in between a bodega and an apartment building. If it weren’
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Fundamentally, It’s Love
For longer than I knew, my father’s Arabic-language Bible lay on the dining table, a thick, gold-leafed tome, warm and fragile with years of page-turning, the family’s sacred text that had sustained Dad on his long journey from Syria to America. That Bible now sits atop my own bookshelf.
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Mass With an Ailing Pope
We were told to meet at the Bronze Door of the Vatican Palace on the morning of Dec. 23 last year. After the security check and a short wait at the foot of a monumental marble stairway, we were led up through the vast courtyard of St. Damasus, down a long gallery decorated with frescos of old maps a