Recently I led a week-long retreat for some 60 people at a renewal centre. Overall, it went very well, though ideally it could have gone better. It could have gone better if, previous to the retreat, I had more time to prepare and more time to rest so that I would have arrived at the…

Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, told this story of his first Communion. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family in France and on the day of his first Communion he said to his mother: “I don’t understand what I’m doing.” She answered simply: “It’s okay, you…

Everyone longs to know something that’s secret, to know something that others don’t know, but that you know, and the knowledge of which gives you some insight and advantage over others who are outside the inner-circle of that secret. It has always been so. Historically this is called ‘Gnosticism’, which forever makes an appearance in…

The renowned spiritual writer Henri Nouwen made no secret about the fact that he was emotionally over-sensitive and that he suffered, sometimes to the point of clinical depression, from emotional obsessions. At times, he, a vowed celibate, was simply overpowered by the feeling of being in love with someone who was hopelessly unavailable that he…

Among those who write in the area of spirituality today, who’s being read? Here’s my list of spiritual writers who are highly influential today in the English-speaking world:   Henri Nouwen – Dutch/American, Roman Catholic, priest. Perhaps the most widely-read and most-influential among all contemporary authors in spirituality. Thomas Merton – Roman Catholic, monk. One of…

Central to the Enlightenment’s criticism of belief in God is their assertion that faith is a naiveté

Evolution, Charles Darwin famously stated, works through the survival of the fittest. Christianity, on the other hand, is committed to the survival of the weakest. But how do we square our Christian ideal of making a preferential option for the weak with evolution? Nature is evolutionary and, inside of that, we can perceive a wisdom…

An open letter to Catholic bishops

We judge ourselves, we punish ourselves and we put ourselves in various forms of hell

We live inside a world and inside religions that are too given to disrespect and violence. Virtually every newscast today documents the prevalence of disrespect and violence done in the name of religion, disrespect done for the sake of God (strange as that expression may seem). Invariably, those acting in this way see their actions…