In one of his books on contemplative prayer, Thomas Keating shares with us a line that he occasionally uses in spiritual direction. People come to him, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re…

At any given time most of the world believes that death isn’t final, that some form of immortality exists. Most people believe that those who have died still exist in some state, in some modality, in some place, in some Heaven or Hell, however that might be conceived. In some conceptions, immortality is seen as…

There is no such thing as pure objectivity, a view that is free of all bias. Yet that’s the claim often made by non-religious, secular thinkers in debates about values and public policy. They argue that their views, unlike those who admit that their views are grounded in religious principles, are objective and free from…

The Buddhists have a little axiom that explains more about ourselves than we would like. They say that you can understand most of what’s wrong in the world and inside yourself by looking at a group-photo. Invariably you will look first at how you turned out before looking at whether or not this is a…

Recently I read, in succession, three books on suicide, each written by a mother who lost one of her children to suicide. All three books are powerful, mature, not given to false sentiment and worth reading: Lois Severson, Healing the Wound from my Daughter’s Suicide, Grief Translated into Words, lost her daughter, Patty, to suicide;…

Some years ago, I officiated at a wedding. As the officiating priest, I was invited to the reception and dance that followed upon the church service. Not knowing the family well and having church services the next morning, I left right after the banquet and the toasts, just as the dancing was about to start.…

What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but suffer the loss of your own soul? Jesus taught that and, I suspect, we generally don’t grasp the full range of its meaning. We tend to take Jesus’ words to mean this: What good is it if someone gains riches, fame, pleasure, and…

Recently, at an academic dinner, I was sitting across the table from a nuclear scientist. At one point, I asked him this question: Do you believe that there’s human life on other planets? His answer surprised me: “As a scientist, no, I don’t believe there’s human life on another planet. Scientifically, the odds are strongly…

There are now more than seven billion people on this Earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the centre of the Universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods and in our families.  And no one’s to blame for this, save God…

“God, as I understand him, is not very well understood.” A colleague of mine, now deceased, was fond of saying that. It’s a wise comment.  Anyone who claims to understand God is deceived because the very first dogma we have about God affirms that God is ineffable. That means that we can know God, but…