Category: Advancing the Kingdom

As the adage has it, ignorance is bliss. This may be so when related to the innocence of young children who, still unexposed to evil, are content in their trustful openness to the world and its wonders. For the rest of us, though, ignorance is…

It’s still there. The Charcoal Pit on the Concord Pike has been a constant. As teenagers we made a ritual of going there after Saturday night movies for hamburgers (pre-MacDonalds) and milkshakes. I recall once we gathered there on a Friday after seeing some film.…

God is not directed by history. He is its author and guide.   But for the active role of Providence in our lives history would neither exist nor perdure. We today accept with beguiled resignation the label of ‘postmodern’.  With an arrogance rivalling that of…

This phrase was recently part of a liturgical prayer in which grace is requested to foster in us a deepening awareness of the sacred. By themselves, however, the two words standing alone offer a beguiling ambiguity – one having to do with the grammatical anomaly…

It is understandable how the adage ‘virtue is its own reward’ has fallen into desuetude. (Indeed, the word seems to have been supplanted by its ubiquitous but impoverished substitute: ‘value’).  For the most part the expression would be irrelevant in today’s zeitgeist where the only…

A tenet that typifies the mindset of today’s zeitgeist is ‘seeing is believing’. Unless something can be physically touched, empirically attested or scientifically affirmed it is not credible. The ‘unseen’, the ‘untouched’ – these cannot be ‘true’. They are ‘unreal’ for they do not pass…

Readers may recognize this phrase from O Salutaris Hostia, the eucharistic prayer composed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It translates as immortal Godhead, one in three. Isn’t it astounding how the one word, unitrinoque, enshrines one of the greatest mysteries of our…

Given all that is happening today it is easy to succumb to despair. However, if we shift our view from the limited focus on the roiled present and widen it to the broad expanse of history we will find an inherent dynamism propelling us forward…

Recently I conducted a review of the thousands of distributions the National Catholic Community Foundation has made on behalf of our donors since our inception twenty-five years ago.  It comes as no surprise that the majority of the organizations – both domestically and internationally –…

 So as not to embarrass him I will not identify Mr. H. other than to state it was he who several decades ago impressed upon me the richly varied significance of the Incarnation. If he reads this column perhaps he will agree that his instruction…