Did I ever tell you about Ruth She was a checker at the grocery store my father ran One of my earliest childhood memories was Ruth seeing my toddler self on the arm of my mother pick up a Tootsie Roll to put in my pocket She whispered something into my Mother rsquo s ear After my first ldquo

What if you could change history That rsquo s the provocative premiss of Stephen King rsquo s newest offering entitled 11 22 63 A Novel The date of course is that of the Kennedy assassination a watershed moment in modern history But what if there were a way to go back and prevent Lee Har

Bishops of Rome teach infallibly ex cathedra ldquo from the chair rdquo or as Bishop of Rome on questions of faith and morals Granting their infallibility in matters of content no one so far as I know has ever claimed on behalf of Roman Pontiffs a sense of timing that is without error

We desperately want someone to gather together both the disparate pieces of our personal lives and our planet’s history. One could say that we want someone to harvest history, our own and that of the world. And here’s the truth: the Church recognizes that harvester in the person of Jesus the Christ

The problem with parables is presumption Hearing them we assume they rsquo re meant for another For example we take for granted that we are wisely investing the talents that God has given We simply assume that we rsquo re like the Good Wife from Proverbs busy with our worthy labors But th

Years ago I served as a dean of students in a seminary college I was surprised perhaps because of my own youth to discover a number of dysfunctions among our students I was particularly amazed by the abuse of alcohol which seemed little different from any other college campuses despite our

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

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

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

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