My stepmother sometimes says she’s “busier than flies on horseshit.” It’s a striking image, and I think of it once in a while when I run across someone who’s really busy. There’s an interesting question lying just under the surface when we look at how busy we are. One way to ask the question is…
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In a recent article in Church Life Journal, Timothy O’Malley wrote about the difficulty Americans have in understanding Catholicism. It’s hard to do justice to the article in a page long note, and if you want to see the whole thing, click here. Here’s an attempt at a summary. O’Malley writes that we Americans think…
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Who are we? One of the ways we might describe ourselves is as members of communities. Or at least we used to be that. Wendell Berry has been doing some remarkable writing on the nature of communities and in an essay he published a few years ago he ties together concern for the environment, civil…
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I’d like to begin this little reflection by saying clearly that I love my country. There is so much good in us, and there are so many possibilities for us. We Americans have many good qualities, and some great ones, too. At the same time, our culture needs to be healed. We are not living…
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Introducing St. Paul’s new decorating team! This is a new crew of parish leaders who will work to prepare our beautiful building for each liturgical season. Last week they met to decide on decorations for Lent. Fr. Mike explained what is required for the season and showed the team what we had available for use.…
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From the Lamp Magazine, Issue 7, St. Rose 2021 I was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder manifesting as a general weakness of my voluntary muscles. Along with it comes a variety of secondary difficulties as limbs atrophy and radical sedentation becomes a lifestyle. Weakness defines my life. And that’s not a bad…
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I started visiting Cook County Jail in 1985 and have been going ever since. For a while I was stationed in South Chicago and couldn’t go regularly, but often enough parishioners would end up in the jail and I’d see them. When I started, the jail was pretty small… it started on 26th and California…
DetailsHace tiempo que no he hablado con un pandillero. En San Pablo en estos días, cada vez hay menos de ellos… el barrio está cambiando y se están moviendo poco a poco. De una manera extraña, eso hace que la situación sea más peligrosa. Solía ser que una pandilla controlaba un área bastante grande ……
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It’s been a while that I haven’t spoken with a gang member. In St. Paul these days, there are fewer and fewer of them… the neighborhood’s changing and they’re moving out little by little. In a strange way, that makes the situation more dangerous. It used to be that a gang would control a pretty…
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What’s in a word? Language changes. What was a common expression in 1960 or 1860 might mean something completely different in 2021. Our ways of using words and the words themselves change… partly because the world changes! After all, who could have imagined something like a “television” in 1900? We didn’t even have radios then! …
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