The Good Word

Let me speak of feasts I have eaten I can recall most of my life through the prism of food made served and shared I have an early memory of sitting in the kitchen of our Vancouver home after trick or treating as a little boy and eating a hot dog and drinking hot chocolate on a cool Halloween even

Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he had finished one of his disciples said to him Lord teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples He said to them When you pray say Father hallowed be your name your Kingdom come Give us each day our daily breadand forgive us our sinsfor

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

Today the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time is also known as Respect Life Sunday nbsp There is a wonderful story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on September 9 2011 that is worth revisiting in this regard It is the story of a courageous young girl Bayza Weeks and the compassionate suppo

Are you hedging your bets Paul in Philippians imprisoned perhaps awaiting death by judicial decree is all in Throughout the letter joyous in tone and content Paul is clear that the life he has chosen as a follower of Jesus is not a life that that he lives with reservations or qualms Paul wi

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Jerome probably the greatest biblical scholar of the Patristic period and a Doctor of the Church Jerome was skilled in translation and is responsible for much of the translation of the Latin Bible that came to be known as the Vulgate He was conversant with the tran

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 abandoned

As an introduction to the hymn in which Paul describes Christ rsquo s self- emptying he pleads with the Philippians to change their minds that is not to shift positions on a particular issue but to alter transform and recondition the way in which they relate to one another If then there is an

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

Deacon Tom Cornell a longtime friend of the magazine and a member of the Catholic Worker sends this homily from from St Mary rsquo s Church in Marlboro N Y He preached on September 18 the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Today rsquo s Gospel reading is not a recommendation for the reform of labo