I’m not a literary critic, nor pretend to be. Simple fact, I don’t read enough. A busy, pressured life affords me only some smaller windows of time within which to read anything that’s not directly related to my ministry. Nonetheless, I try to be faithful to a discipline I set for myself years ago, namely,…
The Christmas story is surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It chronicles a birth from which the world records time as before or after. Moreover, it is written in a way that has inflamed the romantic imagination for 2,000 years. This hasn’t always been for the good. Beyond spawning every kind of legend…
I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may,…
Why are so many people leaving their Churches? There is no one answer to that question. People are complex. Faith is complex. The issues are complex. Looking at the question, it can be helpful to distinguish among a number of groups. The ‘Nones’, the ‘Dones’, the ‘Spiritual-but-not-Religious’, the ‘Indifferent’, the ‘Angry’, and the ‘Marginalised’. While…
Our greatest strength is often our greatest weakness. Sensitivity is a gift, but as any sensitive person will tell you, that gift can be a mixed blessing. Sometimes a thick, calloused skin can save you from a lot of suffering, particularly from heartache. The popular spiritual writer Henri Nouwen was a highly sensitive person. That…
I was raised in a generation that taught that God gave each of us a vocation to live out. In the religious ethos of that time, particularly in Catholic spirituality, we believed that we were put on this earth with a divine plan for us, that God gave us each a special vocation to live…
In a recent book, Living Between Worlds, James Hollis offers a piece of wit that carries more depth than is first evident. A therapist says to a client, “I cannot solve your problem, but I can give you a more compelling story for your misery”. That’s more than a wisecrack. Whether we feel good or…
“To tell someone, with fullness of heart, ‘I love you’, is virtually the same as saying, ‘You shall never die.’ Twentieth century philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote those words and they echo words written 500 years earlier by Blessed Magdalen Panattieri, a Dominican Tertiary, who wrote to a friend, “I could not be happy in heaven…
“No man is an island.” John Donne wrote those words four centuries ago and they are as true now as they were then, except we don’t believe them anymore. Today more and more of us are beginning to define our nuclear families and our carefully chosen circle of friends precisely as a self-sufficient island, and…
Let the preacher say, you have permission to be sad! In a book, When the Bartender Dims the Lights, Ron Evans writes: “There’s a line I came upon in the musings of a preacher: On a Sunday morning many of the people sitting before you are the walking wounded, and you need to give them…