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…

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…

What’s it like to lose yourself in order to accomplish something important? Mission Impossible. That was also the theme and the name of a hit TV show in the 60s which, years later, Tom Cruise would parlay into a movie…

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…

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…

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…

A church usher is like a hotel bellhop—without the tips. You really don’t notice us until you need us—or until we put a basket in front of your face for the parish’s weekly tip. But like a hotel bellhop, church…

Some of our greatest masters of the arts were inscrutable. Their mystery is displayed in their works and by their lives. Such strange manners contributed to our fascination with their art. Salvador Dali, Picasso, Grandma Moses …all had mysterious ways…