When I ask Padre Juancho, a Maryknoll priest in Bolivia, if there had been a particular priest who inspired his vocation, he says, “No. It was a horse.” He...
Spirituality
I was 20 when I first felt that God might be calling a baptized Episcopalian to join the Catholic Church, but it would be more than 10 years later before I...
What are you looking for? Jesus asks this question of his disciples, those who propose to fall in line behind him. It’s a question we might ask more than we do...
At Halloween, my big brother liked to terrify me with stories about live burial. While our parents thought we were sleeping, he told me tales of screams rising...
One thing I didn’t expect about working at a parish named Our Lady of Sorrows was the frequency with which friends, acquaintances, and strangers, upon hearing...
Exile is an experience of abandonment, something we have likely all encountered at some point on our life journeys. It is rooted in the archetype of the...
Ten years ago, I lived by the Venice Beach Boardwalk, famous for its outdoor weightlifting complex known as Muscle Beach. Bodybuilders such as Arnold...
We are alive because of our ancestors, that “great cloud of witnesses” mentioned in the letter to the Hebrews (12:1). Our grandmothers and grandfathers...
“Do not speak harshly to an older man, but speak to him as to a father,to younger men as brothers, to older women as mothers, to younger womenas sisters—with...
Our kids yelled at us on Ash Wednesday about not wanting to go to church: They loathed the gritty feel as the ashes were smudged on their skin, the residue...
