In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how she once prayed at a low time in her life. Dorothy Day, as you know, grew up without faith. An intellectual, moving in Marxist and anti-church circles, she entered her twenties convinced that if anyone had the courage to look life square in the eye,…
Why did early Christianity alight on the ideal of virginity, when an intelligent or even just a suspicious Roman could see that its adoption would undermine the very fabric of ancient society?” That’s a comment from historian Kate Cooper and it poses some questions worth examining. Does the single state, celibacy, (vowed or otherwise) undermine…
In the movie The English Patient there’s a very heartwarming scene. A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose…
Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then. Among other things, we prayed the Rosary every day, prayed the…
Gilbert K. Chesterton, the renowned Catholic apologist, was great friends with George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, even though Shaw, an agnostic, had major issues with Chesterton’s belief in God and especially with him becoming a Roman Catholic. Indeed, when he heard that Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic, he wrote him a letter expressing…
My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me. Only later did I realise that I no longer needed him, though…
The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection. God does not exist. We create God, and we create him in our image and likeness, ultimately to serve our needs. We create the notion of God because we need a…
I teach a course on the renowned mystic John of the Cross. Since this is never a required course for any student, I usually begin the first class by asking each student why he or she is interested in this course. The answers vary widely: “I am taking this course because my spiritual director told…
There are parts of scripture that should come with a warning label, the kind they sometimes flash at the end of a movie which reads: “No animals were harmed.” One such text is a story in the Book of Judges (11,29-39). It’s the story of a king named Jephthah who is at war and makes…
No amount of preaching shapes a soul as much as seeing someone living an honest life. If that’s true, and it is, then no marriage course is ever as powerful to teach about marriage as is the witness of a good marriage. I understood this first-hand several years ago when I attended the 50th wedding…