Photo Credit: Annunciation Catholic Church (I originally planned a different topic to write about this week but before I settled with my laptop I caught the news about another school shooting. I had to change the topic. I simply had to.) I was assigned to teach in an elementary school for only three of my forty... Continue Reading →

Photo Credit: Getty Images “The laborer is worthy of his hire.” Luke 10:7 I have become aware of the achievement of hard labor more the last few years than ever before. This is probably due to maturity and the sensitivity it brings to mind. I've been thinking of my uncles who labored in Pittsburgh steel mills and became... Continue Reading →

Photo Credit: NASA (Kuiper Belt) Ok, I admit. I’m a card-carrying, bona fide believer in extraterritorial intelligent life. I have visited Roswell, New Mexico on the anniversary of its museum and spoken to people who knew directly of the events surrounding the interplanetary evidence that landed there in 1947. We studied government documents and correspondence... Continue Reading →

This coming Sunday, Christians will hear a part of Luke’s gospel which will disturb us, make us squirm a bit in the pew, distract us to think about the upcoming picnic or our favorite team’s exhibition game slated for the afternoon. Jesus’s words are instructional: “I have come to light a fire on the earth…Do... Continue Reading →

The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism sponsors a Triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious at its home, Notre Dame University.  The conference highlights women religious and their contributions to the American Catholic church history.  The theme for this 13th Triennial Conference was Lives and Archives. Some friends of mine who have attended the... Continue Reading →

“They ask their mothers,      ‘Where is the cereal?’ In vain, As they faint away like the wounded      In the streets of the city, And breathe their last    In their mothers’ arms.” (Lamentations 2:12) The other morning, I woke to the news reported from a decimated hospital in Gaza. The doctor being interviewed in Gaza, Dr. Nicholas... Continue Reading →

Photo Credit: Montreal Museum of Fine Art (Before I begin this post, I have to celebrate this blog which posted its 300th publication last week. I forgot to mention it at that time. It's been three hundred weeks, never missing a Monday morning, since ‘in-things-charity’ has appeared. I pray it continues, and I welcome your ideas for... Continue Reading →

Goodbyes are never easy. We all know this because we all experience goodbyes throughout life. I've been pondering a coming goodbye in my life, one of a treasured place of higher learning that sent me into the world with a youthful eagerness to apply what I learned but also to enlarge that learning constantly for the... Continue Reading →

Photo Credit: The New York Times  On June 25, just a week ago, we lost Walter Brueggemann, an American theologian and well-known scholar of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. A few weeks before Brueggemann’s death, the respected minister-turned journalist, Bill Moyers died. Both men were in their early nineties. Both were Southerners. Both wielded a... Continue Reading →

Photo credit: Pixabay.com I first mentioned Kindland to my readers about a year or so ago. Kindland is headquartered in Mayfield Heights, Ohio just outside of Cleveland. The word is determined from a word formula: Kind (ness) + cleve (Land). It stems from the Values in Action Foundation which fosters values education in local schools in most states in... Continue Reading →