While I was doing graduate studies in Belgium, I lived at the American College in Leuven. On staff there at the time, in the housekeeping and maintenance department, was a wonderfully colourful woman whose energy brought oxygen into a room but whose history of marriage somewhat paralleled that of the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel.…

When Pope Francis launched the Holy Year of Mercy, he promised that Christians could gain a special indulgence during this year. That left a lot of present-day Roman Catholics, and even more Protestants and Evangelicals, scratching their heads and asking some hard questions: Is Roman Catholicism still dealing in indulgences? Didn’t we learn anything from…

Sometimes we’re a mystery to ourselves, or, perhaps more accurately, sometimes we don’t realise how much paranoia we carry within ourselves. A lot of things tend to ruin our day. I went to a meeting recently and for most of it felt warm, friendly towards my colleagues, and positive about all that was happening. I…

When I was a child there was a popular song whose chorus repeated this line: “Everyone is searching for Utopia.” And we all are. Every one of us longs for a world without limits, for a life where nothing goes wrong, for a place where there’s no tension or frustration.  But it never happens. There’s…

As a young boy, I longed to be a professional athlete but I had to soon accept the unwelcome fact that I simply wasn’t gifted with an athlete’s body. Speed, strength, coordination, instinct, vision… I got by in ordinary life with what I had been given of these, but I wasn’t physically robust enough to…