Latest Articles
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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…
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When They Make Me Pope
The first thing I’ll do when they make me pope is write a brief letter recommending—strongly—that pastors replace the “beautiful crucifix” over the altar with an image of the Risen Christ, which may be pretty or not but represents the truly beautiful historical reality. That’s the trouble: the crucifixes above altars not only in the United States…
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Choose Your Classroom
When I was teaching at the old Jesuit High School in what is now downtown Dallas, my mother was teaching kindergarten in what is still Holy Name of Jesus school on the campus of Loyola University of New Orleans. My mother and I corresponded (well, she wrote a lot more and much better letters than…
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Complete Joy
It seems odd to me that the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth alive today feel that He wants us to mortify ourselves and suffer. We have plenty stories about how He was asked to pull men and women out of their suffering and how promptly He did it. Among the most striking is the story…
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The Errors of Finding in the Temple
We all know the story about Jesus when He was twelve years old, remaining in the Temple when both of His parents spent a whole day on the way home to Nazareth. That was a longa walk – maybe ninety miles—and the first day would have been tiring. The men and the women who had…
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Just ‘The Presentation’
Luke’s Gospel tells us this: When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (Lk.2: 22). So the overlap of Purification and Presentation began very early. The purification rites were for the Lady Mary. During the 40…
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No Mass on Sundays
LorSomething or maybe my Guardian Angel nudged me as I knelt down to say my night prayers. We used to make a novena to Christ the King for freedom of religion in tough countries. We don’t do novenas any more like our grandparents, who also said the “Morning Offering” and “Bless us O Lord” before…
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Snow Angels and Purgatory
Evaristo Mapruanga SJ, a Jesuit brother from Zimbabwe, had never seen snow. So when he came in 1989 to my program in Texas for his final Jesuit training, I found this out and The Cheerful Charlie Jesuit Annual Hiking Corps (at that time me and Donald Gelpi SJ, R.I.P.) felt we could correct that. Evaristo…