Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. . . . You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you d...
"Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years, and Sarah had stopped having her menstrual periods” (Gen 18:11). This is the kind of detail that frequently perplexes my undergraduates. Why does the Bible care about Sarah’s fertility?
It is common knowledge that the homilies offered in many Catholic parishes (how can one say this charitably?) often have a lot of room for improvement. The quality of Catholic homilies, of course, varies widely according to the specific parish and priest involved. I have actually heard some of the best sermons of my life in Catholic Masses. But I have also heard plenty of lousy homilies too. So, i...
A city isn’t just a group of people living closely together. It’s a place with pride, with a vision of what it means to belong together. New York City is the city that never sleeps. Los Angeles is the city of possibilities (and of constant outdoor recreation). They have different visions of human happiness, of what it means to live together.
The cost of being one of Jesus’ disciples in the Gospel of Luke is steep. As we learn on the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, to follow Jesus may require us to leave behind everything.
When I teach Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in my literature survey course each semester, I need to take a certain extra amount of time to explain to my students just what these characters are doing by going on a pilgrimage: it is not something that younger people are often familiar with or find attractive, and yet I think that for Christians the idea of living the pilgrim life can be a very rich way ...
“Mine.” It’s a word that parents of young children hear a lot. And it’s a sentiment that parenthood slowly chisels out of you—that false sense of being able to lay claim to things to which we’re attached. Naptime, for example: naptime is “mine”—my oasis of peace while the children both sleep, God willing. Perhaps nothing has taught me more about the potency of expectation than the day-to-day suspe...
Marianne Stroud has been assisting at births since she was a teenager in South Africa, tagging along with her mother who worked as a midwife there. Today she is a Certified Nurse-Midwife and mother herself, as well as a convert to Catholicism, who works at a practice that was founded to offer women an authentically pro-life approach to women’s health services. The Fertility & Midwifery Care Center
We are a society which tends to live out of its mouth. It is hard to visit a doctor’s office, a restaurant, or even a church these days when folks are not chirping about this or that. Perhaps some of it is necessary; much of it not. And maybe we have always loved much talking. After all, even before technology made instant communication a no-brainer, oral cultures trafficked in stories, gossip, an...
This isn’t the behavior of a Messiah. You can almost hear the crowd gathered around Jesus murmuring this to themselves. They haven’t followed this prophetic miracle-worker, this teacher extraordinaire to watch him die.
