In a book, 12 Rules for Life – An Antidote to Chaos, that’s justifiably making waves in many circles today, Jordan Peterson shares about his own journey towards truth and meaning. Here’s that story… At one point in his life, while still young and finding his own path, he reached a stage where he felt…
We’re all familiar with the incident in the Bible where God changes the name of Abram to Abraham. The change seems so small that often times it isn’t even picked up by those reading that text. What’s the difference between Abram and Abraham? The name Abram, meaning ‘exalted father’, is the name given the great…
“Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” Abraham speaks these words to a soul in Hell in the famous parable of the Rich Man and…
“Woe to chastity that is not practiced out of love, but woe to love that excludes chastity.” These are the words of Benoit Standaert, a Benedictine monk, and they can, I believe, be profitably read in our culture today where to the detriment of everyone, the sexually active and vowed celibates alike, sexuality and chastity…
Carlo Carretto was an Italian monk who died in 1988. For many years he lived as a hermit in the Sahara desert, translated the scriptures into the Tuareg language, and from the solitude of the desert wrote some extraordinary spiritual books. His writings and his Faith were special in that they had a rare capacity…
Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait. That’s a counsel from the Book of Lamentations and while perhaps not the best response to the recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church, it seems the only helpful response available to me as…
There’s a rich literature being written today by some highly intelligent, sensitive men and women who might best be described as agnostic stoics. Unlike some of their atheistic counterparts whose one-sided attacks on religion suggest that they “doth protest too much”, this group doesn’t protest at all. They don’t attack faith in God; indeed they…
Thomas Aquinas once suggested that it’s a sin to not give a compliment to someone when it’s deserved because by withholding our praise we’re depriving that person of the food that he or she needs to live on. He’s right. Perhaps it’s not a sin to withhold a compliment but it’s a sad impoverishment, both…
Some of my favorite authors are agnostics, men and women who face life honestly and courageously without Faith in a personal God. They’re stoics mostly, persons who have made peace with the fact that God may not exist and that perhaps death ends everything for us. I see this, for example, in the late James…
A particularly powerful Gospel story recounts Jesus meeting with a Syro-Phoenician woman. Central to that story is where their encounter takes place, on the borders of Samaria. For Jesus, Samaria was a foreign territory, both in terms of ethnicity and religion. In his encounter with this woman, he is standing at the edges, the borders, of…