Critics can rsquo t decide if Chad Harbach rsquo s The Art of Fielding is really a book about baseball There rsquo s a lot of ldquo other stuff rdquo going on in the novel But certainly in the character of Henry Skrimshander it offers a wonderful description of what it means to be consumed by A

It rsquo s difficult to imagine a biblical passage so well known and yet so utterly incomprehensible to modern readers as Abraham rsquo s near sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah In this age of Tiger Moms and of parents whose lives revolve around their children what are we to make of a story in wh

Lent begins with the sturdy words ldquo Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return rdquo They rsquo re a reminder that the world around us mdash and the world of care and concern we carry daily within us mdash is passing away Like so much of the faith that rsquo s easily asser

In this year of grace 2012 given all the effort that the English-speaking Church is currently expending upon the words that we use in the liturgy it is a comfort to come to a day that almost preaches and prays itself Granted we still have to battle our way through the Third Edition of the Roman

I was searching the web for a video which I wanted for class but YouTube was rather sure that I would prefer to watch one entitled ldquo Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus rdquo Seemed like the sort of thing a college theology prof should take in so I did A couple of weeks later at the end

Remember this scene from John Steinbeck rsquo s depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath A cook a waitress and two truckers are in a diner on Route 66 Outside A woman in the car a flaxen-haired woman said ldquo See if you can get it here rdquo The man turned off the hose and screwed on

Because my interest in priesthood began in junior high I attended the strangest and most wonderful of high schools a boarding school run by Capuchin Franciscan friars in Hays Kansas Thomas More Prep What was strange Two years before I arrived it had been two separate schools both run by the f

The First Mass took place in a small Eastern Kansas farming community its citizens equally divided between Catholics and Mennonites I was there as the vocation director for the Diocese of Dodge City which Fr Jim the newly ordained had joined while working in the western part of the state A

Grandma Klein took milk in her coffee My parents drank theirs black I remember fetching milk for her from our fridge and her saying ldquo I like a little coffee in my milk rdquo That was the afternoon that I asked her how she had met my grandpa I was in junior high school My grandfather

Ironically one can learn a lot about what it means to be human from the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas on angels Consider for example a contrast the angelic doctor draws between angels and humans Every human being is an individual member of what Aristotle called the human species but St Thoma