Subtle Forms of Idolatry: Ask The Tough Questions, Singles
In my more reflective moments, I am sometimes forced to ask myself: Am I really interested in God or am I only interested in things about God? Am I more interested in teaching, speaking, and writing...
View ArticleInside Our Search For A Soul Mate: Seeking A Confessor
Perhaps more than anything else, we are unconsciously seeking a confessor, someone before whom we can open our hearts, be completely transparent, pour out our confusion and freely admit our sins....
View ArticleDon’t Let Your Limited Imagination Define God
God’s ways are not our ways! There is more truth to that than we normally think. God is ineffable. What that means is that God cannot be captured in our thoughts or pictured inside our imaginations....
View ArticleIn The Grip Of Grief, Only Time Will Heal
What can we say in the face of deep loss, inconsolable grief or unrequited obsession? As a graduate student in Louvain, I once posed that question to the renowned psychologist Antoine Vergote: “When...
View Article‘Those Patient Enough To Yearn’: Singles & The Virgin Birth
Christian tradition has always emphasized that Jesus was born of a virgin. The Messiah could only come forth from a virgin’s womb. The main reason for this emphasis of course is to highlight that Jesus...
View ArticleSexual Attraction Doesn’t Compete With Desire For God
“Like a deer yearns for flowing streams, so my soul yearns for you my God.” “My soul keeps vigil for you in the night.” We’ve all heard these lines, prayed them, and in our more reflective moments...
View ArticleNine Takes On The Rich Meaning of Christmas
What does Christmas mean? Christmas is like a perfectly-cut diamond twirling in the sun, giving off an array of sparkles. Here are just some of its meanings: 1.) A 4-year-old child woke up one night...
View ArticleWisdom For Singles In Fr. Rolheiser’s Favorite Reads
There’s some rhyme and reason to how I select my reading material. I check reviews. I try to be alert to what gets mentioned when friends and colleagues talk literature, and I deliberately set myself a...
View ArticleComfort For Single Parents & Grieving Parents
Margaret Laurence’s novel, A Jest of God, tells the story of two sisters: One of them, Rachel, single still and childless at mid-life, is a gifted, elementary school teacher. The other is a...
View ArticleWhen There’s No Stepping Off Life’s Treadmill
The past several weeks have been some of most pressured weeks in my life. I have been trying to balance the pressures of teaching a three-hours-a-day Intersession course, my duties as an administrator,...
View ArticleTormenting The Cat: Why We Seek Excess
Eighty-five years ago, G. K. Chesterton looked at his society and saw some things that disturbed him. Here’s his comment: There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending,’...
View ArticleStraining For Sabbath Amid Digital Demands
A comedian recently quipped that today’s information technologies have effectively rendered a number of things obsolete, most notably phonebooks and human courtesy. That’s also true for human rest....
View ArticleSingles, Let’s Reconsider The Snap Judgments We Make
There’s a Buddhist parable that runs something like this: One day as the Buddha was sitting under a tree, a young, trim soldier walked by, looked at the Buddha, noticed his weight and his fat, and...
View ArticleContemporary Apologetics: Praise For Fr. Gallagher’s Book
One of the reasons why we don’t often find a good Christian apologetics today is because so many of our best theologians write at such a level of academia that their thoughts are not really accessible...
View ArticleThe Other Side of Orthodoxy: Heeding Two Dangers
There are more ways than one in which our belief system can be unbalanced so as to do harm to the God and to the church. What makes for a healthy, balanced, orthodox faith? The Oxford Dictionary of the...
View ArticleOn Holiness & Sexuality: Does God Have Favorites?
Does God love some people more than others? Does God have favorites? This is an old, disputed question with centuries of history: Is there a chosen race? Are... Read More
View ArticleRestless Hearts: Why We Struggle To Be In The Moment
During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage in an attempt to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is a very... Read More
View ArticleHow Singles Can Develop Maturity In Prayer & Relationships
Several years ago a friend shared this story with me: Raised a Roman Catholic and essentially faithful in going to church and in trying to live an honest... Read More
View ArticleOn Not Running With The Crowd: How To Be Singular
In the Gospels, the word “crowd” is nearly always used pejoratively – so much so that nearly every time the word is used you could preface it with... Read More
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