The beasts have an advantage over us when it comes to suffering.

My father was the most amiable of men I used to laugh at him in conversation with guests He rsquo d say to one uncle quot Yes you rsquo re right quot A moment later he would say to another of a quite contrary opinion quot I can rsquo t disagree with that quot If I later challenged him o

Can you still say the Pledge of Allegiance Can you recall the wording of the Boy Scout Oath or the Girl Scout Can you recite an Act of Contrition Whether we understood it at the time in childhood we committed these avowals to memory as a way of preparing for adulthood The Pledge of Allegiance r

Grandma you want to play Mass quot quot Play Mass How do you play Mass quot I hated to think this about my own Grandma Klein especially as she was staying several days with us that summer but she was a little slow She wasn rsquo t good at playing Candy Land and in summer who wanted to pl

All Saints Day 1950 was properly joyful in Korea U S Army Chaplain Father Emil Kapaun celebrated four field Masses that day for the soldiers in the Third Battalion of the Eighth Calvary Regiment Camped almost on the Chinese boarder the men believed the war all but won All Souls is a somber da

No less a theologian than Saint Thomas Aquinas lamented that when it comes to understanding the Holy Spirit our problems begin with the name Summa Theologiae I 36 1 Think of all things that can be called holy or how often one might speak of a spirit Even with the two words conjoined the min

Here rsquo s a passage to ponder It rsquo s from My Beloved World 2013 the memoir of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sottomayor As a young child she didn rsquo t feel particularly close to her mother a working nurse raising two children while struggling with her husband rsquo s alcoholism Then

What do we know of heaven Jesus Where is heaven Jesus What is heaven like Jesus The questions and answers may seem blithe but they come to the core of the bittersweet mystery we call the Ascension quot As they were looking on he was lifted up and a cloud took him from their sight quot Ac

Cell phones texts Tweets emails uploaded photos and videos Skype Facebook pages and blogs Communication technology doesn rsquo t only permeate modern life its melds with our humanity itself A young person today might not emerge from the womb with a smart phone but there aren rsquo t many

Orvieto is an hour rsquo s train ride north of Rome about half-way to Florence Once you arrive at the Stazione Termine you rsquo ll need to take a funicular up to the city which sits on a high fortified butte overlooking the Umbrian plain It rsquo s worth the trip Life on earth doesn rsquo t