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...
Spirituality
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...
In the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of shutdowns, the politicization of vaccines, and increasing attention paid to the nation’s violent acts of racism...
“Now hang on a minute. Go back,” said my Jesuit friend over Zoom. “You said you’d made a good discernment. But I hear you saying things didn’t turn out as...
Charges of “virtue-signaling” can be found frequently on social media these days. After the murder of George Floyd, those who expressed outrage at both the...
