Gaudete! Christus Natus Hodie! A blessed and merry Christmas to all! I want to share you one of my favorite humorous Christmas songs—it goes well with the pierogi we made for dinner tonight: Read more
Gaudete! Christus Natus Hodie! A blessed and merry Christmas to all! I want to share you one of my favorite humorous Christmas songs—it goes well with the pierogi we made for dinner tonight: Read more
My last homily for Advent and it is a day late. This week I had a hard time making myself sit down and read the readings, let alone reflect on them. And I have only been doing this for two months. My respect for pastors who have done this for years, and give thoughtful sermons every week, grows each time I do this. Trying to make the Letter to the Hebrews fit with the other readings finally led me to... Read more
My homily for Gaudete Sunday. This Sunday my parish celebrated the feast of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe with a big bilingual mass. It was beautiful but I am a bit sad from this experience—an odd sensation for this Sunday! Maybe I will write about this later in the week. For now, however, my latest offering. This one has been hard to wrap my head around: for a long time I found the gospel to be at odds with the first... Read more
ONE IDEA I’VE BEEN MEANING TO WRITE ABOUT is a proposal to provide banking services to under-served communities — typically poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color — through the U.S. Postal Service. As a practical matter, the only financial services now available in those under-served communities are payday lenders and check cashing joints. For those unfamiliar with how such places work, they make their money by charging exorbitant fees to the people in our society who can least afford to... Read more
Resolved: No Catholic, in good conscience, can or should support Donald Trump for president. I started this post last week—I wish I had posted it then since I would have been ahead of the curve! My reasoning in support of this resolution goes like this: Catholics are called to support the common good. This must be done prudentially, and Catholics may legitimately disagree, within the broad parameters of Catholic teaching, on which approach is best and, therefore, on which candidate... Read more
A homily for the second Sunday of Advent. As I was reflecting on the readings, I happened to reread a poster created for me many years ago by the students in my first year seminar, Radical Christian Poverty. A quote from Dorothy Day got me thinking about preparation. And then, from a different direction, I began to think about the purported “war on Christmas” (see the cartoon on the Vox Nova Facebook page). What follows is the result. As always,... Read more
From Jennifer Worth’s memoir, Call the Midwife (the basis for the BBC/PBS TV series of the same name, which I was alerted to by this review in America), recounting her experiences as a young nurse-midwife in the 1950s, working with an order of nuns in London’s East End: For the first time in my life I began to understand that Christmas is a religious festival, and not just an occasion for overeating and drinking. It had all begun in late November... Read more
“One cries out: Lord, how long? And then, too, what creeps into my mind is the little fear or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful? I want to stay on now. I believe now that this is right…Here I am starting from scratch but it must be his plan and He is teaching me and there is real peace in spite of many frustrations and terror around us…God is very present in his seeming... Read more
The latest in my continuing attempt to write a homily on each week’s readings. Today at mass we had a visiting priest who talked about Advent as a season of hope, tying it in to the beginning of the Year of Mercy next week. I touch on hope, but my thinking went in a very different direction. Today we begin the season of Advent, the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year. Often we view Advent as a period of preparation... Read more
Twice, that I can remember, I have been mistaken for a Muslim. It may have happened more often than that, but only twice did the person making the mistake call themselves to my attention. The reason for this mistake is really quite simple: in colder weather I wear a keffiyeh as a scarf. I started doing this about thirty years ago on my honeymoon. Keffiyehs were popular with German university students as scarves, and I bought a cheap one since... Read more
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