Little Great Friday… Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist… (Matthew 11: 11). Each year, on August 29th, the Christian liturgy celebrates the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Herod arrested John, “on account of Herodias,” his brother’s wife. The Baptizer publicly censured […]
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Purgatory, prayer and CS Lewis Before Father Joe, I’d never thought of the souls in Purgatory as my brothers and sisters. In fact I didn’t think of them at all. But then I attended a November week of Masses in Half Moon Bay, California. They were celebrated by a newly ordained priest at Our Lady
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Time: Ordinary and otherwise Time. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world. Until suddenly, we don’t. Maybe because of serious illness when I was four, time has always felt like gift to me.
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We have no right to happiness: Last words of CS Lewis Right, it’s the title of the last article CS Lewis penned before he died. I’ll admit his statement consititutes a 180 for me since I have written numerous times about happiness—what I think is entailed to be happy. And more recently, thoughts that achieving happiness have
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Sin doesn’t come first- we get it backwards! This past Sunday’s Gospel was St. Luke’s account of Simon’s-he who would become Peter- first encounter with Christ. St. Luke provides many details. So many in fact, that it’s easy to place ourselves there. And because of that, to write about witnessing Peter’s catch. But there’s even more here!
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Contradictions of sin and mercy There are times when an essay from the past feels fitting. This is one of those times. Mostly because there is one man who better understands the contradictions of sin and mercy better than any other: Karol Wojtyla. His first published work was a series of meditations prepared at the
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CS Lewis and Karl Rahner Most likely they never met. But the atheist turned Anglican Christian CS Lewis and the Roman Catholic Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner perceived their God in radically similar ways. Both men served as apologists for their faith causing more than a little consternation in the minds of more rule bound colleagues.
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John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images The Great Divorce: A Reread …the bus was full oflight. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They wereall fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, someglaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond
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People you’d like to meet in heaven I think a book by this name was published a few years back, or maybe it was a movie. Regardless, I think about that question now and then, and perhaps we all do. When I read something that prompts me to consider this possibility, I get stuck on
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