On Sunday nights, my wife and I do our meal planning. We look ahead at our schedule for the week and decide when we will do the grocery shopping, what…

It is fascinating how the readings for today, the Fourth of July, challenge us to think about peace. In a letter to his wife, dated July 3, 1776, the day…

In ancient England, the streets were lit by gas and there was a person who went from light to light turning on the gas and lighting the lamp. They were…

I find it hard to let myself experience joy. Perhaps I am too pessimistic and analytical, but I feel perfectly justified in waiting for the other shoe to drop. In…

Life would be easy if it weren’t for all these people getting in the way. Sometimes it’s at the office: a co-worker decides to store an enormous, half-empty casserole dish…

Saint Joseph’s, the parish church where I worship, is one of the oldest in Minnesota. It has distinctive walls made of local rocks, quarried or found as fieldstone by the…

Today’s feast does not commemorate one saint but a meeting between two pregnant saints: Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her kinswoman Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. According to…

Processions! Pageants! Picnics! Roasted fowl! Bird-shaped pastries! Historically, European Christians celebrated Jesus’ ascension into heaven with symbols of flight and ascent. Ascensiontide, the ten-day season beginning today, leads to Pentecost.…

In his classic work, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann points out that the twofold task of the biblical prophets was “to criticize” and “to energize.” To criticize is to call…

Calls can come in strange ways—or so the casting of lots may seem to us. Not so for the believers of the time. What really speaks to me most is…