Gospel John 13:13 : Now he showed how perfect his love was ‘Do you understand’ he said ‘what I have done to you? You call me Master and Lord, and rightly; so I am. If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet. I have given you…
Jared Diamond, the distinguished Professor of Geography at the UCLA gave the Lewis Thomas Prize Lecture at the Rockefeller Institute, NYC, on March 27, 2003, on “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions” and destroy themselves. This work is also published in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Book. The references to the US…
“The Second Coming” Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the…
There is a quiet solace in the sleepy air that envelops a tropical afternoon at the year-end, when the weather is cool and kind, the soft skies are heavy with clouds and the rain drives in gentle or sharp torrents, Here, the sleeping dog lies, bolstered by the faith that with evening, her proverbial daily…
Traveling through rural Japan, in the island of Kyushu, one is reminded of the fate of the Christian missionaries who were mercilessly persecuted by the then Shogunate of the Edo era. The fate of those who ministered to the Way, and their proselytes have been dramatized in the 2016 Martin Scorsese’s period portrayal of Shūsaku Endō’s…
The venerable Jean Vanier, who is 89 this year, has in recent times come into the consciousness of those of us who have not encountered him and his life’s work or mission in encountering the disabled and the poor. His biography is widely available, as in this site and his writings are just beginning to…
“Walking through one of the buildings where I hadn’t been before, I came across a reproduction of Hazard Durfee’s beautiful flute player with the text by Henry David Thoreau: ‘Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps…
Not long afterwards, Lewis read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) and was surprised to find the whole Christian outline of history making sense. An even stronger blow at his efforts to keep God at bay came, when he wrote in Surprised by Joy, Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew…
As He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him (Lk 9:18). This passage is cited in Pope Benedict’s book, Jesus of Nazareth (the first of the Trilogies) as a “deliberate paradox”. He writes that “the disciples are drawn into his solitude, his communion with the Father that is reserved to him alone. They are…
I first came across the works of Father Josef Neuner, S.J., in several scholarly articles published in Review for Religious (2001) on interpreting the spiritual journey and darkness of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. In a posthumous collection of her personal letters, Come be My Light (Doubleday 2007), representing her ‘unauthorized’ autobiography, Father Neuner was indeed the spiritual director…