What Do You Ask God For?
Friends, for this Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our first reading from the marvelous book of Wisdom presents an old biblical trope: If you were to ask God for something, or if God were to com...
7 Loka 202414min
The Biblical Vision of the Family
Friends, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark this week are of great importance. They have to do with what we call Christian anthropology—the biblical understanding of who we are—an...
1 Loka 202414min
Whoever Is Not Against Us Is For Us
Friends, the first reading and Gospel this Sunday have to do with the Church at war with itself. The devil is the scatterer, the divider, and one of his favorite tricks is to take the Church—which is ...
25 Syys 202414min
The Ladder Doesn’t Matter
Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children, versions of which appear in the three synoptic Gospels, so vividly remembered by the first Christians? I think they intuited that it got v...
17 Syys 202414min
Faith Without Works Is Dead
Friends, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”—and this week, I am going to go once more into the issue of faith and works, which has been dividing Western Christianity since the Reformation. Our...
10 Syys 202414min
Be Opened!
Friends, our Gospel for today is the evocative scene of Jesus healing a man who cannot hear and cannot speak. This man is beautifully symbolic of many in our culture today: we don’t listen to God, and...
3 Syys 202414min
The Goodness—and Dangers—of the Law
Friends, as Americans, we have a very ambiguous relationship to law. On the one hand, we are a nation of independently minded people; we don’t like the law imposing itself on us. At the same time—let’...
27 Elo 202414min
Do You Accept This Teaching?
Friends, we come now to the close of this great discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, where we see the aftereffects of his teaching on the Real Presence. The Eucharist is a standing or fall...
20 Elo 202414min
