We’re all familiar, I suspect, with the difference between justice and charity. Charity is giving away some of your time, energy, resources and person so as to help others in need. And that’s an admirable virtue, the sign of a good heart. Justice, on the other hand, is less about directly giving something away than

What would Jesus do? For some Christians, that’s the easy response to every question. In every situation all we need to ask is: “What would Jesus do?” At a deep level, that’s actually true. Jesus is the ultimate criterion. He is the way, the truth and the life, and anything that contradicts him is not

It’s becoming increasing difficult in today’s world to trust anything or anybody, for good reason. There is little that’s stable, safe to lean on, trustworthy. We live in a world where everything is in flux, where everywhere we observe distrust, abandoned values, debunked creeds, people moving on from where they used to be, contradictory information,

Everywhere in Church circles today you hear a lament: our churches are emptying. We’ve lost our youth. This generation no longer knows or understands the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how? The Church is becoming ever more marginalised. That’s the situation pretty much everywhere

What does it mean to have a vocation? The term gets batted around both in religious and secular circles, and everyone assumes its meaning is clear. Is it? What’s a vocation? Carl Jung defined it this way: “A vocation is an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from

We tend to nurse a certain naïveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then, of course, is that having fear and doubt when one is

It’s hard to be humble, not because we don’t have more than enough deficiencies to merit humility, but rather because there’s a crafty mechanism inside us that normally doesn’t let us go to the place of humility. Simply put, as we try to be self-effacing, humble and non-hypocritical, invariably we take pride in that and

A friend of mine grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family. Here’s how she tells the story:   By the time my father died, his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other any more. We’d

In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand

The religious congregation to which I belong, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, has had a long relationship with the indigenous peoples of North America. Admittedly, it hasn’t always been without its shortcomings on our side, but it has been a sustained one, constant through more than 150 years. I write this out of the

Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own

We quite naturally tend to think of the word “Christ” as Jesus’s second name. We think of the name “Jesus Christ” in the same way that we think of names like Susan Parker or Jack Smith. But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word “Christ” is a title which, while