A Homily for those Preparing for Confession If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing. –1 John 1:9– On my bookshelf, there rests a little volume entitled God Never Panics by Nate Carter. Here is
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A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent Year A Father Bernard J. Ezaki Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. There are tears in our affairs, and things mortal touch the mind. –Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, Line 462– In 1867, Mark Twain took a cruise with some fellow Americans
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A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent Year A Here is one of my favorite stories. It is entitled, “Grandma’s Pet Duck,” and its author is Pastor Steven Cole. I give it to you with a few embellishments: When little Johnny was visiting his grandparents, he was
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A Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time Year A In the 1996 movie The Preacher’s Wife, Denzel Washington plays the role of an angel named Dudley. One scene is a particular favorite of mine. A little boy, unaware that he is speaking to an angel, asks Dudley
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I was recently surprised to learn that National Geographic’s geneticist Spencer Wells has argued convincingly that, based on markers in human DNA, all human beings are descended from a single set of parents! That’s right. Wells calls them, appropriately enough, Scientific Adam and Scientific Eve and says they lived
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If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it
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Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
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The following comes from a book entitled Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul,[1] published way back in 1997. I used to give this piece to my students. It’s called “The Mirror.” “Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?” The usual laughter followed and people stirred to go. Papaderos held
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In 1980, when Renée Riley was a chubby cherubic child of all of four months, she captured the heart of artist and family friend Dana Van Horn, who was then living in upstate New York. At the time, Van Horn was hard at work on a commission he had
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A Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, Year A Jesuit priest Father Mark Link tells this story: John was a contractor for a construction company. To increase his personal income, he routinely cheated on materials that went into the homes he built. He was so adept
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