FIFTY YEARS AGO, prior to my freshman year at Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin H.S., the late Father W. Vincent Bechtel introduced me to The Summer Reading List, upper-case. Father Bechtel didn’t fool around: He tossed his teenage charges into the deep end of the English and American literature pool and told us, in effect, “Start swimming.”
FOR MANY PEOPLE around the world, summer means vacations. When I grew up in Hong Kong, we did not have the practice of family vacations. Early in my career, our family went to wherever I had a summer conference. It was not quite a vacation as I always spent part of the time away from the family, laboring and stressing over various duties.
A few weeks ago, after Ireland voted to approve so-called “same-sex marriage,” a correspondent sent me an e-mail quoting Cardinal Walter Kasper’s comment on the result: “A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people, and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights.”
ON A CLOUDY Saturday morning, I sit in my usual prayer spot by the patio door and watch the birds in the yard. I admit, I find them endlessly fascinating. The little sparrows who process almost solemnly by my small statue of St. Francis; the tiny, brilliant yellow birds who make a quick appearance and then flit away; the occasional bright red cardinal; the bevy of robins; the shiny, noisy blackbirds; the pairs of turtledoves who stay so lovingly close together – they all intrigue me.
I’M FORTUNATE TO hear good preaching on a regular basis. But even the best Catholic preaching leans far more toward moral exhortation than biblical exposition. This strikes me as a missed opportunity. For if one of the tasks of preaching today is to help the people of the Church “see” the world and our lives more clearly by piercing through the regnant fog of cultural confusion, then there’s no substitute for expository preaching that digs into the biblical text, unpacks it and shows how it provides a unique optic on the here-and-now.
By Karen Osborne It’s the age when you’re legally independent, the age when you can vote or join the military. In the U.S., 18 is more than an age. It is a set of experiences. It is a magic wand that spins out a Cinderella-like transition from teenager to adult. It is the thing you […]
“I NEVER SAW a hearse towing a U-Haul,” remarked a friend of mine the other day. He was talking about the problem of materialism in contemporary life and the need to find ways of convincing young people that there is a whole lot more to life than making money and piling up possessions.
WASHINGTON (CNS) – The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is borrowing an argument from Dr. Seuss in its complaint against Google with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Political gridlock is regularly deplored by pols, pundits and citizens alike. My contrarian view is that it can serve useful public purpose.
A FEW YEARS AGO, Scott Bradlee was living in a basement apartment in New York City, hustling for jazz piano gigs at clubs and restaurants, and dreaming of something better. So he got a few friends together, started arranging jazz-, ragtime- and swing-style covers of modern pop songs, filming them, and uploading them to YouTube. His project, Postmodern Jukebox, exploded. The power of the share button catapulted them to Internet stardom – and then, the real thing.
