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For many this week marks “Back to School” time (though I’ve long since held school should always be out from Memorial Day to Labor Day – so apologies to kids as I have nothing to do with setting the schedule!).  Admittedly the fact that the days of me having to think about school starting again […]

Shortly before we were ordained, then auxiliary Bishop Richard Pates gave each member of our class a framed quotation from Saint John Henry Newman. It’s his response to someone, and it can be summed up simply as “trust the Church.”  Newman himself came to see this gradually throughout his life. The son of a well-off

One time at seminary, we had a speaker talking to us on ecumenism, a fancy word on how we strive to work together with people of other faiths. She told the story of growing up how the Catholic kids would always cross the street on the way to school because on their path they walked

One of my favorite courses in seminary was an elective class we had on the virtues and their corresponding vices. The virtues are the gifts we are given from God at our baptism and by virtue of being born into this world. Among them is the virtue of hope. Hope as the virtue isn’t like

Last week, on Wednesday, July 29th, we celebrated the feast day of Martha, Mary and their brother Lazarus who shared a home. The feast was, up until 2021, Saint Martha’s Day, but I like the change made by Pope Francis, because taken together, the saints show us the importance of both work but also listening

An old Jewish folktale tells of how once there were two young brothers who had spent all their lives in the city, and had never even seen a field or pasture. So, one day they decided to take a trip into the countryside. As they were walking along, they spied a farmer plowing, and were

A word you’d hear quite a bit in seminary is “formation,” meaning that over the course of your time in seminary, you try to grow as a person. You study the faith, but you also want to grow in your relationship with God too spiritually, which is true for all of us. We might learn

Johnny Cash, as he came to really embrace his Christian faith, once said: “Being a Christian isn’t for sissies. It takes a real man to live for God — a lot more man than to live for the devil, you know? If you really want to live right these days, you gotta be tough.” How

In the 1940s, Normal Rockwell completed a series of 4 paintings on freedoms, highlighting freedom of speech, of worship, freedom from fear and freedom from want. My favorite is freedom of speech; it features a working-class man at a meeting getting up and speaking his mind as the others look on with respect. What makes

When I think about the Catholic faith in my life, I think about it like two sides of a coin. On the one side, there is the learning of the faith that is still ongoing: that comes with prayer, with being taught the faith from my parents and in faith formation as a child and