Listening at the Dallas Synod
“Listening at the Dallas Synod” by Fr. John for The Texas Catholic. Plans are well underway for the 2024 Synod — that big meeting to advise the bishop about the spiritual, material and administrative situation of the Dallas Diocese. Essential to its...
Mary, mother of every beloved disciple
“Mary, mother of every beloved disciple” by Fr. Thomas for Texas Catholic. Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends...
Faith in Medicine
“Faith in Medicine” by Fr. John for The Texas Catholic. Our world needs Christian faith. A book that proved this to me regarding the medical field is Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality by Charles C....
The plea of an atheist for biblical beauty
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, declared in a book of prose that “the Scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.” For Milosz, whose life was scarred by the Nazi and Communist takeovers of his native land, the moral authority and literary beauty of the Bible was a refuge against the lethal and banal propaganda spewed forth from those godless governments and armies, even though he could not bring himself to believe in God.
Wilderness and the Dynamics of Conversion
This Lent I’m studying the “wilderness” or “desert” in Scripture, and especially in the journey of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. The dangerous wild is a powerful image for the spiritual life, and it plays a large part in the lives of figures like Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist and Jesus. What about in yours?