The Liturgical Year Draws to a Close

This year November has five Thursdays, which gives us the luxury of ten days between Thanksgiving and the First Sunday of Advent. I’ve always had a particular resonance with the season of Advent, and I feel a bit cheated when it begins in the midst of the busy weekend after Thanksgiving. While I mostly abstain [...]

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Choosing Good Leaders

Our strong roots in democracy don’t give us particularly good background for understanding the biblical concept of kingship. Living as we do in one of the first countries to reject rule by a monarch in favor of a federation of independent states, we balk at the idea of locating all authority in one person. From [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving!

You care for the earth, give it water;
You fill it with riches.
Your river in heaven brims over
To provide its grain.
And thus you provide for the earth;
You drench its furrows;
You level it, soften it with showers;
you bless its growth.
 
You crown the year with your goodness.
Abundance flows in your steps;
in the pastures of the wilderness it [...]

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On not being cosmic busybodies

Our Gospel today is difficult. Often it’s read almost as a blueprint for the end of the world, a fortune-teller’s description of what will happen before the last days. Books like the Left Behind series spin this out into an elaborate fantasy of good and evil. Even more disturbing are those voices on talk radio [...]

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To Live, to Love, to Leave a Legacy

In a recent episode of The Simpsons, the wealthy businessman Montgomery Burns nearly drowns in a fountain. With what he thinks is his last breath, he says, “Apparently I’m dying. Sure wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
We laugh because we know that the reality is that most people will do anything they can [...]

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Climbing Trees and Scaling Walls

Luke tells us that Zacchaeus is short. It’s probably one thing that almost anyone who’s heard this Gospel story would tell you about him. He’s that short guy who climbed a tree to see Jesus. Often they see it as sort of a slap-stick kind of scene, with a normally distinguished businessman puffing and out [...]

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