Darkness and light are but one, the psalmist tells us. Our lives are filled with both. Sugar and skulls. Flowers and dust. Love and loss. You cannot embrace one without allowing the other.
Death and Dying
Posted inDispatches, Faith
A Catholic Cemetery Convention? Why focusing on ‘deathcare’ matters
“How do we treat those things which are sacred? We treat them with care, dignity and respect. The church calls us to do that with our mortal remains as well.”
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
Why Steve Jobs called death ‘the single best invention of life’
“Death in life” must happen in this life if we are truly to live. We have to encounter an event that overturns our agenda, our way of being in the world, our very sense of self.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Choosing life over death on the George Washington Bridge
What saved me? No simple answers or solutions exist. People in the throes of deep depression cannot see a tomorrow of bright sunshine and love and joy.
Posted inFaith, Interviews
Father Quentin Dupont responds to AP story on assisted suicide of Catholic man in Seattle
‘I was absolutely, unequivocally unaware of Mr. Fuller’s intention’ to kill himself.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
A deadly crash on the Feast of the Assumption
The car flipped over 10 times. Maybe 15. I woke up to steel smashing against cement, over and over, over and over. Glass shattered and flew in my face and hair.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
What my mother’s sudden death taught me about fear
As a priest, ignoring my own emotions and how they may interact with the joys and pains of another is not an option.
Posted inFaith, News
New Jersey assisted suicide law shows ‘utter failure’ of government and society, bishop says
New Jersey’s new law allowing assisted suicide, effective Aug. 1, “points to an “utter failure” on the part of government and indeed all society, said Bishop James F. Checchio of Metuchen.
Posted inFaith, News
Daniel Callahan, a pioneer in bioethics, dies at 88
Callahan was an independent scholar working at the frontier where ethics meets medicine, law and religion.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: What dead animals (and novels) can teach us about live humans
Kristen Arnett’s novel is about intimacy and wanting what is forbidden, about childhood and family, about absent parents and absent lovers, and about the secondhand self-destruction that can be wrought by ignoring cries of the heart.