Wisdom waits for our Inner iGener

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…

Learning from Monuments to our Hypocrisy

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…

Seeing God through the Fog of Physics

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…

A Bridge Out of this World

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…

What are we full of?

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…

It’s personal, not business, with God the Father

There’s a scene in “The Godfather” where an injured Michael Corleone plots the execution of the police captain who broke his jaw. Michael’s big brother Sonny—the next in line to head the family’s crime dynasty—chides this “college boy” for taking…

The Justice of God’s Unfairness

Humanity has figured out many of nature’s laws, but we’ve never mastered God’s physics. We tend to generalize it to our understanding of Newton’s law that every human action should have an equal and opposite reaction from God’s side of…

Our Most Difficult Miracle

Most secular humanists believe that human life lacks a cosmic meaning—and they are okay with that. In fact, they find it liberating.  They embrace the void. It relieves them of worrying about an afterlife—and struggling with the faith to believe…

Practicing The Law without lawyers

The great irony of electronic media is how anti-social they have made us. Technology has taught us to isolate ourselves. Conflicts between “friends” that could once be resolved face-to-face over a cup of coffee now blow up into courtroom conflicts…