“Comparisons are odious.” This aphorism, my siblings and I were told, had been a favorite of our grandmother. Today to indulge in any such discourse would be politically incorrect and socially unacceptable, but we were raised on this principle. And now I am about to…
Author: Dana Robinson
A Christmas Letter
Dear Luke: Because you are three and half years of age, the exchange you had this Christmas morning with me will for you no doubt disappear into the mists of the unremembered. But, I shall not forget. You and your brothers came to your grandmother’s…
A New Christendom?
A millennium ago, it was understood that Christianity and Christendom were coterminous. This identity of course was fractured by the East/West divide in the 11th century and later diluted by the proliferating consequences of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Today the word “Christendom” is…
Sanctus
In a brief autobiography written at the request of his children, my father records that an ancestor of his “had a sense of the sacred.” The phrase has always made me wonder, and today – the beginning of Advent – would be an appropriate time…
Center of vibrancy
Come 2018 the Newman Center at the University of Pennsylvania will celebrate its 125th anniversary. Founded in 1893 by a lay medical student, it is the first – of now many – Newman Centers in the United States. Any one discouraged by the expanding godlessness…
Shall we dance?
Pope Benedict has written that false autonomy leads to slavery. This oxymoronic concept is indeed provocative: to strive for total independence is to achieve total imprisonment. So many of us today are rootless and unguided by the wisdom of tradition and community. Voluntarily or otherwise,…
The youth of faithfulness
“Diversity is our destiny.” Such was the declaration I recently heard on a news report about the demographic evolution in our nation. From a Catholic perspective, diversity is right at home. The word ‘Catholic’ after all means universal. St. Paul underscores the positive reality of…
It’s God’s call
Television ads can be thought provoking. I saw one recently where, when asked “what’s on your life’s to-do list?,” a half dozen bright faced adolescents responded with such admirable aspirations as curing cancer, cleaning the environment, eradicating illiteracy, fostering world peace, and so on. I…
The witness of space
Increasingly dining room tables are a rarity. Perhaps it is because in newer homes dining rooms are rare. (Indeed some would suggest that dining itself has disappeared.) I was thinking about this recently while six of our grandkids – all under eight years of age…
Music, an enemy of piety
As inconceivable as it is for those of us raised in a tradition of beautiful liturgical music there are religions where music – even exquisite music of the caliber of Gregorian chant or Bach’s Mass in B minor – is considered an enemy of piety.…