Give Yourself for Christmas

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Christmas gives each of us the opportunity to give others the greatest Christmas gift of all: the witness of Christ’s birth in our hearts. According to a recent documentary about…

How Our Tuition Gets Paid for Life

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) At Christianity’s dawning, the man we now know as St. Luke was a boy who felt an “Unknown God” calling him to be a man of medicine. And according to…

A Kingdom Rises from Our Klugedom

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Follow the news regularly and you can’t help but realize we live in an imperfect world. Imperfection, a new book by Telmo Pievani, professor of biology at the University of…

Never Underestimate a Grasshopper

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Baby Boomers can remember when TV could offer programming with messages that seemed almost scriptural. Take Kung Fu, for example. It dealt with the adventures of an exiled shaolin monk…

Rising Above Our Best-Laid Plans

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) We enter the season of Advent with many plans for the holidays and many hopes for peaceful get-togethers with relatives we love and those we tolerate. But to paraphrase Scottish…

Love’s Little Things Save Our Life

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Anyone close to a member of the greatest generation has heard the lecture. How as a child they walked to and from school uphill both ways. How, during the Great…

Heroes beyond Banners

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) We’re well into fall, and the Hero banners that have been hanging from our city’s light poles have been taken down for their ceremonial presentation to the families of the…

Zacchaeus in Tap Shoes

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) In Christ’s day, tax collectors were to sin what prophets were to virtue. In the succeeding 2000 years, several professions have been added to both sides of that moral balance.…

Claim Your Own Holy Grail

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Zen masters, philosophers and even clergy compare their search for wisdom to a desire for “The Holy Grail.” In fact Parsifal may be one of their heroes. This is the…