No one who preached this Sunday could ignore the tragedy at Newtown Here is a revision of my homily for Gaudete Sunday The original was posted on Thursday of last week They were a middle class family with middle-sized dreams and cares And of course their own holiday traditions One Christmas cu

They were a middle class family with middle-sized dreams and cares And of course their own holiday traditions One Christmas custom enjoyed by all six of the Martin daughters in their childhoods was leaving out their shoes to be filled with holiday treats The world has come to know the youngest

Last month on a cold November night in Times Square Police Officer Lawrence DePrimo who had been assigned there as part of a counter terrorism unit noticed an old man He was clearly homeless and even more obviously barefoot Officer DePrimo asked the man his shoe size He then went into a nearb

Flannery O rsquo Connor would have proudly owned the noun and the two adjectives most commonly associated with her name It rsquo s hard to imagine an ldquo author rdquo who could have been more ldquo Southern rdquo or more ldquo Catholic rdquo even though she lived at a time when those two a

My friend a pastor received an irate email from a parishioner a Eucharistic minister At one of the previous weekend rsquo s Masses one too many ministers had arrived at the altar to distribute Holy Communion As the last to ascend he had been asked to return to the pew Understandably the eve

Hurricane Sandy can be pondered as a parable because like every parable it contained a paradox In this case one of power The hurricane reminded us of two distinct aspects of power it both savages and sustains life First the savaging Sandy schooled us again about the tremendous power late

A young man appeared at my office door Already a sign that something was up as today rsquo s students prefer to approach life electronically Why talk when you can text Even more ominously he had lowered his headphones Though I don rsquo t know him well he wanted to ask about his grandfather

Lance Corporal Lu Lobello was among the first marines to enter Saddam Hussein rsquo s Baghdad His detachment was assigned to assault a secret-police compound but as Fox Company entered an intersection near their target Corporal David Vidaria the radio operator fell backward shot in the head

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once made an observation that I rsquo ve often repeated in seemingly endless contexts a picture can hold you captive He meant that how we envision a thing can either limit or expand our understanding of it Take for instance your body Before you begin to co