In The Color Purple Alice Walker reminds us how important it is to chase the wrong image of God out of our heads. If we think of God as a white man with a long beard sitting on a throne above it all our spiritual lives will be skewed. This monarchical portrait of God developed when… Read More »

In many of the protest marches you hear the slogan chanted: No Justice, No Peace. The problem comes in imagining that these are choices. The protesters want justice. The government wants peace. For a Christian there is not a choice between justice and peace for they are two sides of the same coin. So when… Read More »

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness. When St. Paul instructs his young apprentice Timothy that Sacred Scripture gives the wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus he is referring to the only Scripture he knew, the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the… Read More »

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The great commandment of Jesus, any school child could tell you, is love of God and love of neighbor. However, when you look at the commandments pronounced by Jesus there are three loves described: love of God, love… Read More »

St. Paul wrote to his young apprentice, Timothy: bear your share of hardship for the Gospel. The hardships St. Paul endured — being stoned, whipped, shipwrecked — seem pretty dramatic. The hardships I endure for the gospel seem tame in comparison but they still challenge me. It is a hardship to “love my enemies, do good… Read More »

In the prayer  of the Church called the Liturgy of the Hours there is a daily reading from one of the Fathers of the Church or a saint or Church document. Today’s reading was from St. Dorotheus of Gaza, a sixth century monk. He challenges us: where do disturbances come from? His answer, because no… Read More »

Today the Church celebrates a new feast: Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church. The interesting lesson chosen for the date is from the story of the temptation of Adam and Even in Genesis.  God asked the woman, “Why did you do such a thing?” The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me into it, so… Read More »

The Holy Spirit seems to like a crowd. In St. John’s Gospel when the Risen Jesus appeared and breathed on the shocked and awed disciples saying “receive the Holy Spirit” it was not to individuals but to the group as a whole that he came. In St. Luke’s account of the first Pentecost, the dramatic… Read More »

You’ve got to love St. Peter. He was so much like us — a combination of faithful dedication and human frailty. Right after he endured the excruciating triple examination by Jesus of his motivations (“Simon Peter, do you love me?”) he betrayed the same tendencies that got him in trouble in the first place. “What… Read More »

A common complaint is that our era — with secularism, materialism, consumerism — is hostile to living the gospel. Actually in every era Christians have made the same complaint. The symptoms might change but “the world” has different values than the gospel.  Remember when Paul was being held in prison he used his right as… Read More »