Christianity is a religion about God, God’s love for creation, and the mercy and grace God is willing to give to those who welcome it. All that is good and true can and will find itself embraced by God insofar as it is good and true; in that embrace, God will bring them together, uniting them so that together they can be led to and directed towards even greater and greater goods, until, at least, they embrace not only that... Read more
Paul talks about how he and the rest of the apostles had become spectacles for the world, not only to watch, but to ridicule. This was due to the fact that they radically followed the teachings of Christ, teachings which often went against the hopes and dreams of the elite. The apostles, indeed, Christians, were drawn to the very people society despised, the poor, the social outcasts, and showed them love. In doing this, the apostles were in solidarity with... Read more
We are to be good neighbors, helping each other with each other’s needs. This is true, not only in relation to material needs, such as food (often represented in Scripture as bread), but also for spiritual needs, which St. Antony the Great also represented as bread: Abba Antony said, ‘A person went to his neighbour in the Gospel in the middle of the night and said to him, “Loan me three loaves of bread because a friend of mine on... Read more
From where I sit, there appears to be two different political philosophies or agendas guiding the United States. The first embraces a concern for the common good, and flowing from that concern, engages social justice with the desire to lift everyone up, promoting the dignity of all persons, no matter the differences which one can find between them (race, sex, religion, cultural background, et. al); what gets in the way of the common good, what gets in the way of... Read more
Knowledge is a good, but like every other good, it can be abused. People can desire it for the wrong reasons, such as those who accumulate facts to make themselves look smarter, wiser, indeed holier than they are. We must do more with our lives than simply learn. We must act upon what we have learned, with the caveat that we do so with proper humility and love: Those who merely grasp at knowledge are themselves grasped by pride: the... Read more
Trials and tribulations come upon us all. Some are much more difficult for us to deal with than others, but during all of them we might wonder, where is God? Has God abandoned us? Why doesn’t God seem to be helping us? While it seems as if God has gone away, if we had a better perspective of the situation, we would see that God is letting us exercise our own agency so that hopefully we can grow and become... Read more
There is a great deal of confusion concerning the categories of sex and gender in the world today. In part, this is because gender has often been treated as the absolutization or essentialization of someone’s assigned sex at birth. Christians, if they look to Scripture and subsequent Christian tradition, should at least question such essentialization. There are indications in both which suggest that in the eschaton, in the kingdom of God, humanity will transcend all temporal sexual and gender designations.... Read more
When J.D. Vance was announced as the Vice Presidential Candidate for Trump, I was not surprised. For weeks, it looked like he was going to be Trump’s choice. He was doing all he could do to show Trump that he would follow Trump’s lead, doing whatever Trump wanted him to do (unlike Mike Pence, who, for all that he did wrong, at least certified the 2020 election results). Vance went from being a Never-Trumper to being one of Trump’s most... Read more
Lately, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has been very disappointing in its actions, especially in regards the ways its leadership has worked to undermines its programs for the poor, peace, and social justice. Yes, there is more to the faith than being a charitable organization, but faith without works is dead. Scripture not only calls us to be concerned for the poor, for those who are suffering at the hands of structures of sin in society, but... Read more
While “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Heb. 13:8 RSV), our understanding and relationship with Jesus is in constant flux. That is because we are temporal beings who are constantly changing, and as we change, we will find our ways of engaging Jesus, and what we learn from that engagement, changes. Hopefully, we will find ourselves attaining greater and greater insight into who he is. This often means we will have to take what we... Read more
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