Ten years before his death in 1996, Henri Nouwen was beset by a depression that nearly broke him. While in treatment, he wrote a very powerful book, The Inner Voice of Love, in which he humbly and candidly shared his struggles and the efforts it took to overcome them. At times, he felt completely overwhelmed…

Why do sincere people so often find themselves at odds with each other?  The issue here is not about when sincerity meets insincerity or plain old sin. No. The question is why sincere, God-fearing people can find themselves radically at odds with each other. Among other things, it can help us understand what’s at the…

Whatever energy we don’t transform, we will transmit. That’s a phrase I first heard from Richard Rohr and it names a central challenge for all mature adults. Here’s its Christian expression. Central to our understanding of how we are saved by Jesus is a truth expressed by the phrase: Jesus is the Lamb of God…

The world will be saved by beauty! Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that, Dorothy Day quoted it, and centuries before Jesus, Confucius made it central to his pedagogy. They were on to something.  Beauty is a special language that cuts through and sidelines all the things that divide us – history, race, language, creed, ideology, politics, economic…

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was once asked by a critic: “What are you trying to do? Why all this talk about atoms and molecules when you are speaking about Jesus Christ?”  His answer: “I am trying to formulate a Christology large enough to incorporate Christ because Christ is not just an anthropological event but a…

Among people of faith, there is the notion that if you are person of deep faith you can easily renounce the things of this world, see the world for all its ephemerality, not cling to things, and die more peacefully. Not true. That is naïve, at least a lot of the time. James Hillman writes:…

One of Dorothy Day’s favourite saints was Therese of Lisieux, Therese Martin, the saint we call ‘the Little Flower’. At first glance, this might look like a strange affinity.  Dorothy Day was the ultimate activist for justice, protesting in the streets, being arrested, going to prison, and starting a community and a newspaper, the Catholic…

You are as sick as your sickest secret! That’s a wise axiom. What’s sick in us will remain sick unless we open it up to others and to the light of day. As long as it’s a secret, it’s a sickness. However, perhaps the problem is not with what we keep secret, but that we…

In 1986, Czechoslovakian novelist Ivan Klima published a series of autobiographical essays entitled, My First Loves. These essays describe some of his moral struggles as a young agnostic seeking for answers without any explicit moral framework within which to frame those struggles. He’s a young man, full of sexual passion, but hesitant to act out…

In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis shares how in his youth he was driven by a restlessness that had him searching for something he could never quite define. However, he made peace with his lack of peace because he accepted that, given the nature of the soul, he was supposed to feel that restlessness and that…