The Good Word

He saw a world suffused with goodness he loved it unreservedly and he called forth the best in us Though he came to live among us his was a foreign provenance He came unto his own and they knew him not And of course he walked the whole way mdash as he would often say mdash ldquo first th

nbsp As children we pass a good portion of each year waiting for Christmas nbsp As adults we spend most of our lives remembering Christmases long lost nbsp When I ponder Christmases past I can rsquo t help but to wonder how my parents did it nbsp They both worked forty hours a week in a gr

Last month on a cold November night in Times Square Police Officer Lawrence DePrimo who had been assigned there as part of a counter terrorism unit noticed an old man He was clearly homeless and even more obviously barefoot Officer DePrimo asked the man his shoe size He then went into a nearb

Flannery O rsquo Connor would have proudly owned the noun and the two adjectives most commonly associated with her name It rsquo s hard to imagine an ldquo author rdquo who could have been more ldquo Southern rdquo or more ldquo Catholic rdquo even though she lived at a time when those two a

My friend a pastor received an irate email from a parishioner a Eucharistic minister At one of the previous weekend rsquo s Masses one too many ministers had arrived at the altar to distribute Holy Communion As the last to ascend he had been asked to return to the pew Understandably the eve

Hurricane Sandy can be pondered as a parable because like every parable it contained a paradox In this case one of power The hurricane reminded us of two distinct aspects of power it both savages and sustains life First the savaging Sandy schooled us again about the tremendous power late

The story is told of a woman who left instructions for her children that when she died they should place on her grave a parking meter that read ldquo Time expired rdquo As we rapidly approach the end of the church rsquo s year time expired is also our theme This time of year as the days sho

A young man appeared at my office door Already a sign that something was up as today rsquo s students prefer to approach life electronically Why talk when you can text Even more ominously he had lowered his headphones Though I don rsquo t know him well he wanted to ask about his grandfather

Lance Corporal Lu Lobello was among the first marines to enter Saddam Hussein rsquo s Baghdad His detachment was assigned to assault a secret-police compound but as Fox Company entered an intersection near their target Corporal David Vidaria the radio operator fell backward shot in the head