Category: Advancing the Kingdom

Today we witnessed an annual event at our Pennsylvania home. The hummingbird returned. Our neighborhood ornithologist confirms that these tiny creatures journey each spring all the way from the Gulf of Mexico seeking summer residence in nectar rich ‘sanctuaries.’ For several years now our terrace…

A few days ago on my daily bus ride to work, I overheard a disturbing conversation. I wasn’t eavesdropping. In fact, I was reading some rather edifying correspondence involving the National Catholic Community Foundation. Seated behind me were a middle-aged man and woman who seemed…

I remember Mr. Creighton always wore colorful bowties and smelled of formaldehyde. The only other recollection I have of this middle school biology teacher is that he introduced us to the mysteries of ‘metamorphosis’ – the Greek derivative signifying change in form – as exemplified…

“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…

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 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…

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…

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…

“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…