A famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night applies to the stars of each of our three readings for this third Sunday of Advent: “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And others have greatness…
As we prepare for the Christmas season, it might be useful to contemplate how we resemble our kids. Childhood is when we master situational righteousness. Think of the little child waiting in the department store line summoning up the guts…
In this age of security insecurity, the best solution is the oldest: get to know your neighbors. That rule applies double if your neighbor’s house has a monster generator and a bomb shelter stocked with supplies. But even if you…
People like to identify themselves using job titles. Our sense of integrity seems tied to our specialties. But for those with faith, our integrity must come from collaborating with each other to make something out of our brokenness. Yes, we’re…
We can all learn a valuable lesson about intrinsic value from our canine friends. Think about how dogs instinctively retrieve bones they’ve buried. They sense what a bone can mean to their survival—so they’ll not only find it a secret…
Welcome to a new generation: iGen’ers, born between 1995 and 2012. This Sunday’s readings are perfect for them—except they probably won’t read or hear them because they won’t be at church—and they certainly won’t see them in the Bible because…
Power brokers in politics, sports and entertainment have recently given us plenty of opportunities to click our tongues and preach to our kids about how power corrupts, yet those of us who are parents sometimes fail to recognize how that…
Jeremy England is an MIT physics professor in real life and plays one in Dan Brown’s newest novel, Origin. Brown, famous for the Vatican-vexing Da Vinci Code, is now rattling cages on the secular side. He created a Dr. England…
We tend to attend more and more funerals as we get older. The bright spot is that our advancing wisdom helps us appreciate good eulogies—those that truly capture the honoree’s character. I experienced one of those a couple weeks ago…
The “Hail Mary” prayer is said millions of times a day, once at a time and in decades of rosaries. It begins, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” We say this so quickly and so often we tend to forget the…