I teach graduate students how to teach math and science. On the first day of each semester, I ask, “Who can tell me something about Albertus Magnus, Albert the...
Wise Guides
When I think of martyrs, I usually think of people with foreign-sounding names like Perpetua or Attalus, both of whom were thrown to the lions in the Roman...
Twice a week I hopped out of a taxicab between the Coptic Christian church and the blue-domed mosque in a neighborhood called al-Abdali. From there, I walked...
“Know who you really are and how God can use you,” one of my seminary teachers exhorted. Living this injunction, simple albeit powerful in message, has been an...
Each time I read a story about someone running into a burning building to save another person, I ask myself: Would I have the courage to do that? The fact is...
“I’m convinced that my life has to end now, early as it seems, because I have fulfilled my life’s mission. I wouldn’t know what else I have to do on this earth...
I first encountered her in a cold stone church in Périgueux, France. She stood in a corner, a young shepherdess with a plaster lamb looking up at her...
I want to be like Sister Dorothy. Dorothy Stang, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was killed on February 12, 2005, by two unknown gunmen. She...
Growing up in an evangelical Protestant family, I didn’t hear much about the Christian mystics. My religious background tended to equate mysticism with occult...
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” So begins “Pied Beauty,” a poem by 19th-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem praises God with the...
