Commentary

There is nothing like the birth of a child to make one appreciate Christmas. Four times, I have experienced such Christmases. Now I am experiencing my fifth. It was the birth of my first grandchild. He was named after my father, Theodore, who died 25 years ago.

St. John Damascene is also known as St. John of Damascus and St. John Chrysorrhoas, Greek for the golden speaker. He was a great scholar and theologian of the East whose influence was so great that he had an impact on great minds of the West, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas.

Challenging Northside narrative  Church ‘sadly silent’  Embrace opportunities  Pro-life policies  Supreme evaluation  Questioning congratulation 

If you had asked me a year ago which biblical figure I’d be most interested in spending a few weeks with, St. John the Baptist would have been toward the bottom of my list. It’s not just that I don’t think I could stomach his preferred diet of locusts and honey, or that self-imposed isolation in a desert isn’t my idea of a good time. It’s that John’s apparent motives for his life and actions never struck me as compelling. In the words of one of my brothers, St. John often just seemed like “Jesus’ crazy cousin” — motivated, perhaps, by some kind of unrelatable, unappealing compulsion or mania. Not exactly my idea of someone I’d want to hang out with. 

Recently, many people have been reaching out with questions about vaccines. So, I thought it would be helpful to mention some of the most common ones and try to provide some answers.

“Synchronicity.” That’s the word one journalist used in a Nov. 3 Instagram post to describe the fact that Election Day fell on the feast day of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of social justice.

The term “Advent” comes from the Latin preposition ad, “to” or “toward,” and the verb, venire, “to come”; as well as the Latin word adventus which means “arrival” or “coming.”