No community should botch its deaths. Last month a wonderful leader within the faith community in Canada died and it could profit us all to more fully receive his spirit. How do we do that? It can be helpful for us, I believe, to highlight those places where his life, his energy, and his leadership…

We share the world with more than seven and a half billion people and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined. This isn’t surprising since each one of us is indeed unique and special. But how does one feel special among seven and half billion others? We…

Writing in the first person is always a risk, but the subject matter of this column is best done, I feel, through personal testimony. In a world where chastity and celibacy are seen as naïve and to be pitied and where there’s a general scepticism that anyone is actually living them out, personal testimony is…

Classically Christianity has listed seven sins as ‘deadly’ sins, meaning that most everything else we do which is not virtuous somehow takes its root in one these congenital propensities. These are the infamous seven: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. In spiritual literature the first three – pride, greed and lust – get…

The power of a subordinate clause, one nuance within a sentence and everything takes on a different meaning. That’s the case in a recent brilliant, but provocative, novel, The Ninth Hour, by Alice McDermott. She tells a story which, among other things, focuses on a group of nuns in Brooklyn who work with the poor.…

There’s an oddity in the gospels that begs for an explanation: Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah. He keeps warning people not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Why? Some scholars refer to this as “the messianic secret”, suggesting that Jesus did not want…

We live in a world of deep divisions. Everywhere we see polarisation, people bitterly divided from each other by ideology, politics, economic theory, moral beliefs, and theology. We tend to use over-simplistic categories within which to understand these divisions: the left and the right opposing each other, liberals and conservatives at odds, pro-life vying with…

Recently I received a letter from a man who shared that he was still deeply haunted by a story he’d heard in grade-school many years before. One of his religion teachers had read them a story about a priest who went to visit a childhood friend. While staying with his friend, the priest noticed that,…

Spirituality   There’s a line in the writings of Julian of Norwich, the famous 14th-Century mystic and perhaps the first theologian to write in English, which is endlessly quoted by preachers, poets and writers: “but all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”. It’s her signature…

Taste is subjective. Keep that in mind as I share with you the 10 books that most touched me last year. That isn’t necessarily a recommendation that you read them. They may leave you cold, or angry at me that I praised them. Be your own critic here and one who isn’t afraid to be…