The Pharisees are often portrayed as self-righteous and judgmental in the New Testament. It’s a broad brush that certainly doesn’t apply to all the Pharisees of the time and especially not to the Jews then or now more generally. Nonetheless,...
What a joy it was to meet my new nephew, Luke! I always feel younger than my age because of my work with children and young people and the contact I have with my own nephews and nieces. Children bring...
Last Sunday morning, I woke up to the news that in Auburn, Mass. a police officer had been shot 5 times and killed during a traffic stop. Officer Ronald Tarentino, Jr. was 42, and had a wife and three children....
Last week, I sat for my comprehensive exams (“comps”), a weeklong marathon of writing that spans the seven strands of knowledge which form the foundation of my doctoral program in theology and education at Boston College’s School of Theology and...
Today is Mother’s Day, and perhaps I should write a sweet tribute. I would be careful to remember that stories about mothers are more complicated than the Hallmark cards admit. There are absent mothers and alcoholic mothers and abusive mothers....
Watching Congress this last number of years has been like watching a streaming movie when you don’t have enough bandwidth. Just when you think it’s working and you’ll enjoy the show, everything comes to a halt. After some fits and...
[caption id="attachment_17182" align="alignleft" width="300"] Christ's Farewell to his Apostles © The Yorck Project[/caption] In Japan and Ecuador this past week, terrible earthquakes took hundreds of lives and left many others injured, emotionally distraught, and faced with the burden of having to...
Who knew that the twelfth hole was going to be a killer? Throughout the Masters Tournament, the commentators were focused on young Jordan Spieth. He was the darling–the favorite—and he was way ahead of the pack. As his drive left the...
Loss—everyone experiences it. Every loss has its own level of emotion. There is the trivial yet less emotional loss like that felt by the whole state of North Carolina when Kris Jenkins’s three-point shot beat the buzzer and wrested the national...
It occurs to me that the wheels of society need a unique source of lubrication. The smooth running of society demands a certain level of doubt. One might think that faith, trust, and mutual respect are much better lubricants...