Category: Advancing the Kingdom

“Dumb Ox”. Each time I find myself several steps behind in conversations with our grandchildren I relate to this moniker given to St. Thomas Aquinas by his confreres. In fairness, in his case it had to do with his laconicism and physical size and not…

“The only access to Heaven is the servants’ door” With our dependence on labor-saving devices and DYI (do-it-yourself) technology household ‘help’ today, and therefore service entrances, are a relic of a bygone era. Will the concept of service itself experience a similar fate? The heroic…

Yes, it is misspelled, just as it is misunderstood. ‘Hierarchy’ derives from the Greek words for ‘sacred’ and ‘order’. With homophonic confusion many think the word refers principally to a ranking system of superiors and inferiors as in military or corporate management. With our democratic…

Readers who attended schools where history was taught may remember learning about the so-called ‘dark ages’, the saeculum obscurum, those centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance. In what was then a still embryonic Europe civil order had…

Depending on whether one’s ‘spective’ is ‘pro’ or ‘retro’ sixty years can be either a long or short time. To borrow Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric: “I am of the latter brand”.  It seems to me just yesterday when in the early 1960s two giants, both named…

The question has been addressed by scholars before. My intention is not to answer it but rather to propose its consideration as a Lenten exercise. What is the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy and how present are they today? Does orthodoxy, ‘right belief’, require or…

In St. John’s Gospel, Nathaniel asks Philip if any good can come out of Nazareth. Would his twenty-first century counterpart express the same sentiment about the Big Apple? If so, a contemporary Philip would likely reply with enthusiasm: “Come and see”. We are invited to…

Ours is a world of proliferating “ologies”. ‘Aetiology’, ‘cognitology’, and ‘onomasiology’ are a few new ones for me. Recently two ‘ologies’ appeared linked in a sentence I read that now unsettles my memory: “Technology defines ontology”. The word ‘technology’ is well understood; not so with…

Does anyone else wonder where surnames have gone? Today it seems that no one has, or at least uses, his last name. The practice of addressing a stranger by his first name – regardless of his age or ‘station in life’ (to use a superannuated…

On that wondrous night two millennia ago what did it signify, that jubilant cry of the heavenly host when, announcing the birth of the Savior, they sang “Glory to God in highest”? What is glory? What has it to do with God? How does one…