I AM at this World’s Curtain Call

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Our parish’s “Deacon Lou” started a recent homily with an inspiring quote: “What we are is God’s gift to us; what we become is our gift to God.”  If you…

A World beyond Death’s Horizon

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) In this Sunday’s gospel reading from John (Jn 1:29-34), he quotes John the Baptist telling of a divine calling to testify to the presence among us of a savior he…

Celebrating the Epiphany with Dick Van Dyke

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) For the world’s most powerful governments, Jesus raised their estimation of Bethlehem and Nazareth from little nothings to great threats. The threat came from many of the citizens of those…

A Cancer We Can Cure

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: ) Silent Night is one of our most beautiful Christmas songs. It’s as solemn as the solemnity we ascribe to its heroin, Mary—the mother of God.  But if we stay silent…

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…