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…

Consider, for a moment, the people in whose presence your heart stops racing, those beside whom you feel centered and serene; the ones in whose company the orbit of your…

Thanks to the restoration of Easter Vigil baptism in many of our churches, our dominant understanding of baptism in our catechesis and liturgical celebrations is that of death and burial…

Today’s Gospel is one in a series of post-resurrection appearances of Jesus that nearly always follow a similar pattern. The risen Jesus appears quite unexpectedly—on the shore, in the garden,…

English speakers have adopted the German Schadenfreude to name the enjoyment (Freude) we derive from other’s struggles and misfortune (Schaden). I’m ashamed that I occasionally experience this vicious delight at…