For centuries, suicide was considered as an act of despair and despair itself was seen as the most grievous sin of all.  In many religious circles, despair was seen as the most sinful of all acts and ultimately unforgiveable. Sadly a strong residue of that remains, suicide is still seen by many as an act…

Dreaming is sometimes the most realistic thing we can do. Or, is there still something else we might do, like public protest, or something else? In his book on prophecy, Commandments for the Long Haul, Daniel Berrigan offers this advice. Prophetic gestures aren’t always politically effective. Often they accomplish nothing that’s practical; but he adds:…

Cardinal Francis George was once asked what he thought of the radical pacifism of people like Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan, prophetic figures who believed in absolute nonviolence. How can this be practical, he was asked, it’s utterly naïve to believe that we can live without police and without soldiers. This was his reply: the…

Information technology and social media aren’t my mother tongue. I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t born into the world of information technology but migrated into it, piece-meal. I first lived in some foreign territories. I was nine years old before I lived with electricity. I had seen it before; but neither our home, our school,…

Moral outrage is the antithesis of morality. Yet it’s everywhere present in our world today and is everywhere rationalised on the basis of God and truth. We live in a world awash in moral outrage. Everywhere individuals and groups are indignant and morally outraged, sometimes violently so, by opposing individuals, groups, ideologies, moral positions, ecclesiologies,…

Belief in God today is often seen as a naiveté. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny – nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark…

The theory of relativity tells us that space and time are not what they appear to be. They’re relative, meaning that don’t always function in the same way and they aren’t always experienced in the same way. Time can stand still. Or can it? This side of eternity, it would seem not. Ever since the…

In both our piety and our agnosticism we sometimes put God on trial and whenever we do that, it’s we who end up being judged. We see that in the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus, particularly in John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel, as we know, paints a portrait of Jesus from the point of…

Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole. Daniel Berrigan wrote that and it’s true too in this sense: unless you can drink in strength from a source outside yourself, your natural proclivities for paranoia, bitterness and hatred will invariably swallow you whole. The disciples in Luke’s…

The poet, Rumi, suggests that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again. That’s a good description of faith. Faith isn’t something you nail down and possess once and for all. It goes this way: sometimes you walk on water and sometimes you sink like a stone.…