March 2016
Lenten Tuppence
During Lent, we tend to hear an increased emphasis on three pillars of Christian practice: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This particular reflection will be about the third pillar, almsgiving, along with some pertinent advice from Mary...
Misguided Manliness: Reflections on the First Episode of "Mad Men"
The opening sequence shows a cartoon man in free fall. Where is he falling to? A past article from The Onion reveals the destination. The headline announces that for the…
The Healing Power of Beauty
This is an essay about vision and blindness, about seeing and the failure to see, about wholes and fragments, sickness and healing, light and darkness, about nativity and the rebirth to eternal youth, about a mode of beauty that does not...
The Idea of a Catholic University
Timothy O'Malley on Catholic identity.
Asceticism as Healing Art
Healing takes many different forms because it is a response to many different kinds of threats. A cut and a broken leg are each healed differently because the damage is different; nevertheless, the same end is sought in both cases. The r...
Palliative Care and Dignity
Phillipa Knaggs on the need to emphasize the dignity of palliative care.
Entertaining Ourselves to Death
On Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep interviewed Senator Marco Rubio about last night's Republican debate. Like many political interviews, it included grandstanding in which Senator Rubio offered talking points rather than answering questio...
Making a Man: Marriage and the Evangelical Counsels
For Marcy, my bride-to-be, and for my friends in Holy Cross, who teach and challenge me every day to be a man of God. In an essay published a few weeks ago in Church Life, Timothy Radcliffe, OP, asked: can male religious…
Contemplating the Cosmos: God is Good—at Physics
One of the first questions people ask me, upon learning I am a physics major, is what exactly I study. In an abstract sense, I study the universe—its fundamental particles, forces, and the mathematics used to describe their interac...
