Latest Articles
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Jesus Is Transformed
Jesus had a premonition or a inspiration that he was to take His closest friends and go up to a high place. There, He was transfigured—His clothes becoming like light and His face shining and splendid. Then Moses and Elijah were with Him, just as physical as He was—suggesting something about the afterlife. But God’s…
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Jesus Preaches the Kingdom
What might it have been like? Maybe like a dean announcing that every graduate who took the LSAT to get into a law school had excelled. Or like a mother announcing to her big brood that she’s PG again and they will have a little sister/brother soon. Well, Jesus did something much, much bigger. To…
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The Feast at Cana
Three things huddle below the surface of this event. First of all is what made the Lady Mary pointedly call her Son’s attention to the failure of wine. She knew that He had not yet used His powers, so insisting now means that she felt that He was in some manner connected with the failure….
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Trust the Way You Pray
My Uncle Chappie, when I visited him in the elegant diocesan hop for the elderly, had a packet of holy cards with prayers on the back. Every one he got—and he got a lot—he added to the bottom of he pack. “It takes me more than half-hour to pray through all of these.” Then he…
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I Want Him Back
My brother Charles and his wife Toby had children from high school to not yet in school. The youngest was Michael. Charles had a warning heart attack but didn’t take the warning, though Toby had tried. The second was fatal. So I came back from graduate school to be there when he died and then to…
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Charlie’s Hope and His Children
A father who is a friend of mine wants his children to go to Mass on Sundays. Charlie (I’ll call him) wrote to me this beautiful sentence that he would like to say to his children to keep them faithful to Jesus and to show it by going to Church: “I want to go to…
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NOTE: History and the Hail Mary
Its hard to believe how much history we run through when we say the Hail Mary. It began some thousand years ago when Christians took the brief greeting of the Angel Gabriel and added the name: Mary. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” (Luke 1:28). Some fifty years later, about 1050,…
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Good on Getting Old
It’s February and all the pretty white stuff on the ground keeps me inside and liable to reflect. I’m well past ninety-four years of life and I’m living with sixty-odd brother Jesuits whose ages are scattered over the eighties and seventies, two decides that I’ve already gone through. Being kept inside means ruminating about ,…
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Note: The World We Live In
Given AI, jet travel, always new antibiotics, and cell phones, we might think that because of all of this, human beings must surely be different from when I was born 94 years ago (before all of this). Not really. We still use words. We still need each other and one another. We still have struggling…
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Jesus Is Baptized with the Rest
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. He had walked a long way from Nazareth to the River Jordan where His cousin was baptizing. He had gone there completely aware that He would be though one with those professing themselves sinners in need of cleansing. He joined…