“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...
Wise Guides
Wise Guides essays explore how saints and holy figures offer wisdom for today. In each reflection, the author connects a historical person’s ministry to our modern spiritual and moral challenges.
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...
Thirty years ago, the fine theologian John Shea, teaching a course on redemption, introduced me to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. I found her stories...
“That’s Jesus, Mama!” shouted my cousin’s exuberant daughter, Claire. Her mother was reading to her not from the gospels, but from the climactic scene of The...
When I walked into the L’Arche home six years ago, I saw the reproduction of Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” on the wall. L’Arche is an...
