Recently and in the past, it was fun to get together with family during the Thanksgiving Holidays to catch up on things and find out what folks had been up to lately. Besides celebrating the victories of LSU and the Saints, as well as not cooking, since we went in with our siblings and ordered turkey and all the fixings from Matherne's Supermarket, I was very intrigued by what my retired brother-in-law, Dale, shared with us about in his adventures with storage auctions.
Each November we enjoy fresh-picked apples, cranberries and pumpkin-spice everything as our excitement builds towards Thanksgiving. The church in the United States observes another celebration this month promoting vocation awareness.
Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, in describing the French mystic Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness. What is that?
Each October the Catholic Church in the United States observes Respect Life Month as a time to focus on the protection of God’s precious gift of human life. The theme of the month varies from year to year, but it usually concentrates our attention on the issue of abortion.
Maybe I’m writing this and no one can relate but lately I have felt as though I am making priority for everyone else’s prayer requests and not my immediate family.
Summertime can be such a strange time. Blessed with a job related to education I get to spend it with my kids. This is both an enormous gift and a giant shift in routine.
We hit the road for a trip to the Grand Canyon in the first two weeks of June. Traveling 3,500 miles in a van is an experience I have never had. Once I digest all the “sanctification” that occurred I will write a different column about that. What I want to shout out in glory is how thankful I am to the Lord for giving me holy friends and “my angel.”
There are four distinct kinds of Christian prayer: There is Incarnational prayer, Mystical prayer, Affective prayer, and Priestly prayer. What are these? How are they different from each other?
We are continuing these catecheses speaking about apostolic zeal, that is, what the Christian feels in order to carry out the proclamation of Jesus Christ.
In St. Matthew’s Gospel, St. Peter asks Jesus how many times must he forgive someone who sins against him. “As many as seven times?” Jesus answers “not seven times but seventy-seven times” (Mt 18:21-22).
In much of the secularized world, we live in a climate that is somewhat anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical. It’s quite fashionable today to bash the churches, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant or Evangelical. This is often done in the name of being open-minded and enlightened, and it’s the one bias that’s intellectually sanctioned. Say something derogatory about any other group in society, and you will be brought to account; say something disparaging about the church and there are no such consequences.
There are not many things that bring my heart as much comfort and joy as the combination of the Blessed Mother and what some might call “tacky” colored lights.