In his “Spiritual Exercises,” sixteenth-century Basque soldier-turned-religious-seeker Ignatius of Loyola lays out a series of meditative practices focused on the life of Christ and designed to focus a person’s external and...

When we went with our children and grandchild for what would be our last visit to their godmother, she was confined to a hospital bed with her neck, broken in a...

For years I taught a World Religions course at a Jesuit Catholic university. Most of my undergraduate students came from homes in which a faith tradition, usually Christian, had shaped them....

On Ash Wednesday as we inaugurate the Lenten season of turning, the liturgy reminds us of our mortality—“from dust to dust.” We enter this season soberly, knowing that we are called...

Our grandchildren frequently request to hear stories about when their grandfather was young, which they call “Little Grandpa stories.” A favorite is the story of the printer’s ink. Decades ago, the...

“It’s a book about two trees,” my student piped up in response to my query to my Classic Literature class about their first impressions of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, that fabled...

“Six days later” is an odd way to start a story. But it’s not the start. The story starts six days earlier, when Jesus invites his disciples on the way of...

Once again, as in Exodus, we are on a mountain. Once again we find Moses and the light of God. And again we experience a cloud of mystery that confounds our...

Sometimes our world seems pretty dark, cloaked in the shadow of racism, violence, greed, and hatred. When the earth is despoiled, when wars rage, when public discourse is fraught with fear...

“We had been eyewitnesses. . . . We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven.” What about you? What have you witnessed? What have you heard? We need not limit God’s revelation to mountaintop...