In my classroom, a groggy eighth-grade student confesses that he was up until 2 a.m. watching YouTube videos. My seventh-grade son declares his parents “the meanest ever” when we disconnect his gaming device during the school week. My 6-year-old asks…
Life is such weight! That is what you suddenly thought Lying awake in the enormous silence that isThe focus of the insomniac’s pained consciousness.So in that pain, rising to the near window, spying The city’s stillness with street lamps intensifyingThe…
The practice of baptizing infants has been sufficiently defended by many writers. (Bromiley’s Children of Promise: The Case for Baptizing Infants [1979] and Brownson’s The Promise of Baptism [2006] are both good examples.) So too, the supposed necessity of immersion…
The universe is vast. On the average, it is about 140 million miles to Mars, which is our next-door neighbor. Considering the broader solar system (from Neptune to the sun), if we were to throw a dart at the solar…
I’ve been thinking lately about fear. There are books already written – and probably a library’s worth on the way – about the way that fear has been used to influence politics. Fear of immigrants is used for political marketing…
“Did you know that the phrase ‘daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer really means ‘supersubstantial bread’? Like, supernatural?” This is the sort of tidbit that gets dropped casually at my house from time to time. It’s what happens when you…
On a leafy Sunday morning, the girls, adorned in lacy white dresses, and the boys, decked out in immaculate suits and ties, excitedly joined their families in a colorful parade to Our Lady of Grace on Avenue W in Brooklyn,…
I got to church very late last Sunday. So late, in fact, that the minister was leaving the pulpit precisely as I arrived. I know that in many congregations people might think I’d missed the most important, the central feature…
“A sacrament is when something holy happens. It is transparent time, time which you can see through to something deep inside time. Generally speaking, Protestants have two official sacraments (the Lord’s Supper, Baptism) and Roman Catholics have these two plus…
This past weekend, a man entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and massacred 11 people gathered for worship. The assailant was armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, three Glock .357 handguns, and a heavy dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Minutes before entering the synagogue,…
