Latest Articles
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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…
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NOTE: UPHEAVAL TOO MILD A WORD
We need to bring to God in prayer the condition of our nation and our world: upheaval might describe them. The condition of our nation: • Our second-term president is talking about “buying” part of a free nation and says the people will leave when he buys Gaza. • Here’s a national paper headline: Your employer…
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Note: It Turns Out
A few weeks ago, sixty-seven (67) people were killed in the District of Colombia (D.C.) in a collision between a military helicopter and an airliner. It also turns out that federal regulators of our air space knew that there was significant danger of collision over the District of Colombia. It also turns out that D.C….
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NOTE: The Real World
Given AI, jet travel, always new antibiotics, and cell phones, we might think that because of all of this, human being 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…