Mass readings for Monday in the second week of Advent: Isaiah 35:1-10 (God himself will come and save you.) Responsorial Psalm: Isaiah...

“The Night of the Hunter,” released in 1955, is one of my favorite Christmas movies. The flight into Egypt is there, in the two children...

In November we remember the dead. I'm remembering my mother. She died two years after this piece was written for Celebration. We waked...

Abba John the Little said: We have abandoned a light burden, namely self-criticism, and taken up a heavy burden, namely...

My friend, Peter Mazar, of blessed memory, told me about a Hungarian Christmas custom. Once the table was set for the feast, with a...

Ritual surrounds us. And the best rituals often happen outside of churches. My cousin’s mother-in-law died one early summer day. I had...

We are approaching the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls. We are journeying with them. We are journeying towards them. Like trekkers in...

Genesis is about births and beginnings — the creation of Adam and the inauguration of Adam’s work in the world. So the Lord God formed...

One late spring day, my husband and I boarded the California Zephyr bound for Chicago. We couldn't board at Union Station in Denver as...

My ballot arrived today. It’s clean. It’s neat. It’s convenient. I can fill out the ballot at my leisure, alone, unobserved and...

Last week, at the the local Sacred Harp singing, we sang a hymn in honor of a long time friend who is ill. The hymn is called...

(It's September and weekly religious education has begun in my parish. The call has gone out for another kind of formation: training for...

(I wrote this piece for the September 2023 issue of Give Us This Day. With the kind permission of Liturgical Press I'm reprinting it...

(RCIA classes are forming. For those of us who take our faith for granted, catechumens in our communities remind us of the holy hunger to...

It's August. The bees are, as the saying goes, busy. We have lots of them, but they no longer live here. They just visit. My husband...

(This is from a reflection I wrote during my mother's last year of life. My mother's birthday fell three days after the Feast of the...

Since 1945, it has been hard to hear the August 6th Transfiguration readings from Daniel without considering another “surging stream of...

Dear Sister Sunday, I can hardly write this for crying. I went to Mass this morning, a weekday Mass, with my toddlers. I needed guidance...

Some Catholics worry that a devotion to Mary can overshadow and maybe undermine one’s devotion to Christ. They warn against a notion of...

It is impossible to act alone in the exercise of reverence. That is because reverence uses ceremony as a kind of language of behavior,...