Halloween was once a holy day to remember the dead. Over the centuries it became secularized into a holiday marked by dressing in costumes mimicking the dead and concealing our living identities. This Sunday’s mass readings are a good opportunity to celebrate the original intent of remembering all souls and saints—and in doing so, revealing […]

There’s a bit of deja vu in this week’s gospel reading. Jesus repeats the same question he posed in last week’s reading: “What do you want me to do for you?” The answers to his question in both cases are quite different and produce different results. In today’s gospel, a blind man gains sight as […]

Jesus gave us many parables by which to gauge and change our behavior. His story-telling has influenced authors for centuries and explains why we can still find great truths in all forms of fiction. As we approach Halloween we’ll be exposed to many scary classics that, beneath their surface, tell us biblical truths. Frankenstein, for […]

All of us who pray are psalmists at heart. Our prayers to God tend to have all the elements of the Psalms that the faithful have prayed for millennia—including Jesus. According to a book Father Pete is using in his class on the Psalms, these prayers have several elements in common, coming from places in […]

Human couplings have a long history of decoupling, dating back to the first—Adam and Eve. Their divorce was from their creator and it set off a long chain of discord that continuously amped-up the consequences of that separation among human beings. This Sunday’s first reading from Genesis (Gn 2:18-24) indicates that human beings were created […]