Secured Passage beyond Our Horizon

New methods and practices designed to save lives can cost them if the people entrusted with those lives stay locked into their old ways. That’s as true today as it was when this Sunday’s Mass readings were written. And as…

Our High Maintenance Inheritance

  Older readers might remember a guy named Paul Harvey. He became best known for his “The Rest of the Story” radio features reporting the unsung outcomes of often-told stories.  Sunday’s gospel reading includes the Prodigal Son parable, which ends…

Rise to Your Faith’s Sacred Grounding

Folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote a song that could be a hymn in all Churches this Sunday: Holy Ground. It was inspired by our first reading (Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15), where Moses encounters the burning-but-not-burned bush sprouting from a sacred desert mountain.…

Evolution is just Creation over time

The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial pitting Creationism vs. Evolution could have been a lot less controversial had William Jennings Bryan used his Bible to let evolution make the case for creation. Instead of Genesis, he should have gone to Sirach—the…

Truth Comes Out of the Lost and Found

Many have a gift for storing scripture in their memory bank. In some it’s a bank of good will, in others, evil is the only interest. In the latter case, scripture is merged with one’s own interests to achieve a…

Harvest Time in Hospice

For many of us life begins in a hospital and ends in a hospice. Both places help families nurture their loved ones. The fruit of these efforts is desperately needed in a world where life is often treated as a…

Caught between Kingdoms

Christians have both feet firmly planted in the opposing worlds of two Adams. The first Adam was a slave to his world while the second reigns over his. The first world is carnal, the second, spiritual. The first loves war,…

The Predator Who Saved Me

People of faith have an ambush predator inside them. It lures Its prey with the host’s joyful demeanor amidst trials and tribulations, then, when the prey asks “what are you so happy about?,” wham, the host explains the source of…

Job One offers Security for Life

Employers can’t seem to hang onto talent very long in this “Employee’s Market.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the share of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs hit a 17-year high in 2018. The article offers employees advice on parlaying…

Mass destruction, singular salvation

An episode on Public Television’s NOVA showed what the mass destruction of the dinosaurs must have looked like after a seven-mile-wide asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago.  Scientists credit nature for this event. Thinking in such broad terms,…