Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, spoke to Belgian Jesuits in September 2010 about a “globalization of superficiality,” a result of a surfeit of information (Click here if you can’t see the video.) I am mindful of Eliot’s lines from “Choruses from the rock”: Where is the wisdom we have lost [...]
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These days I am trying to get my daughters to eat better food than the usual kid fare of mac ‘n’ cheese, hotdogs, and chicken nuggets. I’ve been mindful of how many carbohydrates they eat, how much protein, the variety of vitamin-rich foods, and so on. Not long ago I took my older daughter to [...]
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The decisive moment in Ignatius’s life came when he realized that he was imitating the wrong person. He realized that imitating the example of a noble knight could not satisfy him, and that he had a deep desire to imitate the saints. He had once been satisfied to imitate the knight, with all the social [...]
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It takes a great deal of slow, careful, thoughtful work to learn a language. First there must be the example of someone fluent in that language who acts as a model. Next, there must be careful listening, repeating of sounds that are foreign; memorizing words and their unfamiliar nuances. Over time one builds small sentences [...]
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The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner was once asked in a radio interview why some people didn’t experience God. His response: ‘I don’t believe you; I just don’t accept that. You have had, perhaps, no experience of God under this precise code-word God, but you have had or have now an experience of God—and I am [...]
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Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of [...]
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From the poem of that name by John Donne: Could I behold those hands, which span the poles And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? Could I behold that endless height, which is Zenith to us and our antipodes, Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is The seat of all [...]
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Sometimes God has fun with me. Today was one of those days. I went to a local farm with extended family. My girls had fun with some lovely little bunnies all white and Easterish. After a while I walked around a bit and saw a large Orthodox Jewish family gathering around some lambs in a [...]
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Yesterday I accompanied a group of 50 Boston College students to see the film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux), the story of the kidnapping and murder of the monks of Tibhirine, in Algeria, in 1996. (I’ve also written on this film here.) It’s a beautifully told and acted story: the film [...]
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As I deepen my love for my friend, I come to know what she likes and dislikes. I come to see the world through her eyes, and thereby experience it anew. What once was trite and meaningless to me now becomes an object of wonder, when I look at it with her. This deepening friendship [...]
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