Contemplation

The Chosen

Apr 18, 2025

The Chosen presents us with a Jesus whose divinity you never doubt, even as he appears as warm and attractive, with a humanity that puts you at ease in his presence; indeed, it lures you into his presence.
Searching for Jesus in the afternoon of Christianity

Apr 12, 2025

The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled The Afternoon of Christianity, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is “anonymously present”.
The person of Jesus and the mystery of Christ

Mar 28, 2025

I was raised a Roman Catholic and essentially inhaled the religious ethos of Roman Catholicism. I went to the seminary, earned theological degrees, and taught theology at a graduate level for a number of years before I ever started making a distinction between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’.
Casting out demons through silence

Mar 22, 2025

There is an incident in the Gospels where the disciples of Jesus were unable to cast out a particular demon. When they asked Jesus why, he replied that some demons can only be cast out by prayer. The particular demon he was referring in this instance had rendered a man deaf and mute.
Dark nights of the heart

Mar 14, 2025

There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”
Love and faith as fidelity

Mar 07, 2025

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy.
Our struggle with love

Feb 28, 2025

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor.
Jesus and the poor

Feb 14, 2025

I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instil that in us.
Life and the sin against the Holy Spirit

Jan 26, 2025

There is nothing as psychologically and morally dangerous as lying, as denying the truth. Jesus warns us that we can commit a sin that is unforgivable which (in his words) is a blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.
A double primodial branding within

Nov 01, 2024

From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin we get these words: “Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of heaven and a son of earth.”